


Waverider

by Jrade



Category: Original Work
Genre: Boats and Ships, Naval Battles, No named characters, Not sure many tags will apply, Other, Pirates, Vaguely historical fiction, privateers, prose?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-08-14 13:09:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 59,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16493174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jrade/pseuds/Jrade
Summary: She.That was what they called her - she, and she was to be the fastest clipper in the company even before she touched water. Even as she sat on the blocks at the top of the ways, they all spoke of her speed and glory, the way she would cut the waves.She.Not that she knew this, having no ears, no mind; she knew only as a rock knows - it is wet when it rains, it shakes when the Earth trembles, it frosts over in the winter, and in these ways a rock might know the world, but it is not a conscious effort on the rock's part.Nor was it on hers. She simply was - from that first day, the laying of her keel, she was, and like a rock she might be many things; a rock might be picked up, or flung in anger, it might be a weapon or a talisman, it might be carved into an idol or a trinket or a child's toy.As a rock, was she, from that very first day - she would be many things and known by many names, but all of them, she would be....and they called her she.(NaNoWriMo 2018; experimental, vaguely poetic prose following the life of a ship through her journeys and refits, accidents, etcetera, instead of a standard character-driven plot. Updates daily with the day's writings.)





	1. 01 - Drafting and Laying of the Keel

**Author's Note:**

> This is my project for NaNoWriMo, for 2018; if you haven't heard of NaNo, by all means look it up, it's pretty great. Long story short, it's a creative challenge to write a minimum 50,000 word novel over the course of the month of November. This will be my fifth (I believe? Yes, fifth) NaNo challenge in as many years, and I've succeeded every year past - this year, I decided to do something a little different.
> 
> The point is challenge and pushing the envelope, after all, so I decided - maybe foolishly, only time will tell - to try to write a story without characters. Arguably without plot, I suppose, but rather about a ship. I was inspired in part, I think, by a trilogy I read in youth - "The Wreckers," "The Smugglers", and "The Buccaneers", by Iain Lawrence. I've not read them in years but I remember them being very good, and there's a twist - I won't spoil it for you - toward the end of the third book, as I recall, which I think inspired this story to an extent.
> 
> What form will it take? I don't rightly know. How worthwhile will it be? I'm not sure. Will it be cogent and coherent, and congruent, despite having no real lasting characters and no plot with morality or any sort of message to convey? I honestly couldn't say.
> 
> Will it be fifty thousand words by the months end?
> 
> You can bet your ass it will.
> 
> I figured I might as well throw it up here since, well, y'know, I'm writing it - might as well let folks read it if they want. If you do choose to, have fun with it, and by all means comment if you'd like. I'd love to hear back from you, to refine it as it goes or at least to use the feedback for future!
> 
> Also, it's worth noting, I know very very little about sailing and will be trying not to spend _too_ much time researching minutiae for accuracy, so this may be a little fast and loose with some of what goes on with the ships. At the end of the day, this one's more about the writing than the story, to me.
> 
> Expect typoes, and no editing; expect little to nothing in the way of author communication, if you expect anything at all - but, by all means, expect it to hit and surpass 50k. I can guarantee you that it will.
> 
> One update per day, with what I wrote that day. Rough chapter titles to give a gist of what's been written about. Chapters indicative of the day's writing, not an actual plot-based chapter break. Pretty simple.
> 
> I hope.

She.

That was what they called her - she, and she was to be the fastest clipper in the trading company even before she touched water. Even as she sat on the blocks at the top of the ways, they all spoke of her speed and glory, the way she would cut the waves.

She.

Not that she _knew_ any of this, having no ears, no mind; she knew only as a rock knows - it is wet when it rains, it shakes when the Earth trembles, it frosts over in the winter, and in these ways a rock might know the world, but it is not a conscious effort on the rock's part.

Nor was it on hers. She simply _was -_ from that first day, the laying of her keel, she _was_ , and like a rock she might be many things; a rock might be picked up and carried, or flung in anger, it might be a weapon or a talisman, it might be carved into an idol or a trinket or a child's toy.

As a rock, was she, from that very first day - she would be many things and known by many names, but all of them, she would be.

...and they called her she.

 

* * *

 

Her first name was sketched in charcoal, on thick parchment, in a room filled with smoke from three sources. Thick and black clouds from the fire in the hearth, thin white wisps from a paraffin candle on the desktop, and light grey puffs smelling of spices from the bowl of the man’s pipe.

Her creator - or, one of many.

He was the first, though - the one who took charcoal in hand and sat down at his desk with a thick sheet of parchment: thick for durability, so he could port it around the home and the town; charcoal so he could easily smudge away or lift off any alterations or errors.

There would, eventually, be a rendition in ink.

First, though, came the charcoal - and first came not her name. First came lines, which were nothing to do with her but descriptions of an abstract landscape; aides to let her architect more easily give definition to her form.

As with her birth, so was her design. The keel, laid first.

A thick sweep of charcoal, and his teeth nibbled down on the end of the pipe - he was always buying new ones, with the speed with which he chewed their tips until they were unusable anymore, and he would trim off the chewed end again and again and shorten his pipe more and more, but there were of course limits to anything.

This particular pipe began her design with a stem about twice as long as the thickness of his admittedly stout thumb.

He would purchase a new one before she was finished, before a name was sketched in the corner of her papers and they were rolled up into a tube to be taken to the company offices.

Other men made notes - said her prow was too abrupt, said her keel was too deep, said her width was two feet too many to navigate the waterways they wished; he returned, wet from rain, but her designs were safe in the tube.

Revisions, additions, alterations. Another new pipe purchased.

One thing that was not changed, though, was the name; Isobel Worth. Her first name - taken from her architect’s child after she was no longer using it, a victim of the many things which besought children of the time.

Her keel, of course, was laid first.

Dry, on land, knowing no water save for the occasional rains, she would sit for weeks and weeks as they worked on her, birthing her slowly from the hewn wood of a hundred great trees, from a thousand feet of rope soaked in pitch in huge barrels, from nails and great beams and slim planks, from canvas and chain and block and tackle.

A hundred men or more worked, day and sometimes night as well, with hammers and saws and drills, pounding and cutting and pinning into place all of the parts and pieces - her creators, as well, just as the first had been. No pipes in their hands and no candles nearby, and not a hearth in sight, but creators still.

They gave her a figurehead, a woman holding out a shell which opened to the seas and displayed a pearl even as the woman’s other hand clutched at a similar pearl on her necklace, clothed in thin gossamer fabric which clung to her figure; the figurehead had been carved elsewhere, and sent to join her in drydock.

They called her she, they called her beautiful, they called her swift and gorgeous and sure - they called her a thousand things before she ever had a chance to demonstrate them.

They gathered around with great ceremony - the ways prepared, greased and lined with thick slops of tallow, and her weight held in place by rope and chain. Her creators, all, architect included, gathered around her prow and her figurehead, and they drank to her health and her swiftness.

“The Isobel Worth,” they called aloud, breaking a bottle on her prow from a stand they’d erected there, and it stuck a small shard of glass into her which would not be freed for a very, very, very long time.

They cleared away their stand and their accouterments, they let loose her chain and rope, and she slid in cradle down the ways and out into the water - it swirled madly at her presence, at first, disturbed from the sea’s placid rest.

In time, though, it came to recognize and welcome her presence - recognize as much as a rock might recognize the rain - and it stilled in its protests, still eddying around her hull but only gently.

She sat with her sails furled all night, the stars shining on her deck and dancing off of the water onto her hull, painting her sides with beautiful lights which flickered and swirled as freely as any wave.

It was the next day that her first crew boarded.

Men came, to fill her cabins and galley; they brought barrels and sacks, thick grains and black rum, clear water and coarse sheets for the beds - they brought tallow and rope and pitch, and a carpenter came on with a pack of tools, and the captain in his fine vest and hat. Not as fine as a naval man, perhaps, not a braggart’s cap with its feather’s plume atop, but rather a simpler and fine felted wool hat in black.

They brought in food and utensils, a big iron pot and tin buckets with which to swab the deck, they brought packs of playing cards and small knives but no real weaponry as their journey was to be a safe one, a practiced route through placid waters.

They set about her at once, settling her even before they settled themselves aboard her - they sought the ropes and the sails, unfurling and pulling and tightening, loosening and tying off and adjusting, and the captain’s eye oversaw it all. When he decided they were ready, and when the call was sent around and every man aboard shouted back, “Aye,” they set underway.

Her rudder swung easily on hinges so freshly and thickly greased, the wind being caught but barely by sails set small - she set out slowly, at first, and on the shore were cheering masses and waving hands, streamers and a small band playing bugles and a drum, and she set aside everything she had ever known for the open seas.

Known, at least, as much as a rock or a ship might known anything.

  

* * *

 

 

Her first night at sea was uneventful - sailed through, out of sight of land and with her sails set wide, the waves splitting as her prow bore through them. She split them as easily as any knife has ever carved a meal, barely skipping across their tops and giving rise to that gentle rhythm that sailors come to know and love, and that makes their knees wobble when they find themselves on land again.

That first morning, the sun gleamed across her decks made brighter for the droplets of sea-spray upon them, the tightly set planks beaded across overtop by water from the ocean itself, but only for a short while.

They came, the swabbies, to clear it away - swabbing it, expectedly. The water would cause them to slip, to fall; it would be a threat of injury, for them.

Not for her, though.

She set in the water quite comfortably, racing through it; the planks of her hull shifted ever so slightly, rippling against each other as the pitch-soaked rope between them compressed and expanded to fill the gaps watertight - her hull shivered as she ran the waves, and she was not even near her top speed yet.

The captain commanded his crew finely, and paid the ship quite minute attention. He carried with him a notebook, an issue of the very same company which had commissioned her design and construction, and he wrote down in it all of the things which he noted.

As one might expect, from a notebook.

When one of the crewmates asked over a noise from the mast, he went and inspected and wrote it down - nothing he thought abnormal, but it was the crewmate’s first shipping out and the lad was hardly experienced.

The rudder chains being perhaps tighter than they should have been, he noted as well; a small crack of a gap which developed between two deck-planks near the bow on the third day at sea, a knot which fell free of one of the walls on the sixth.

Every item which pertained to her, specifically, was recorded in painstaking detail so that they might be rectified when next she was in port.

The first voyage was for tea.

Warmer air, and warmer water as well; air so humid that it seemed thick, but she cut it as easily as the waves.

Clouds filled the sky overhead, cutting out what would surely be a sun far too hot for the liking of the crew; already they complained, muttering sourly about the heat and sweat that made spots in their shirts.

Not she, though; she would have been at home in the sun as the rain, and the heat meant little to her. It made her planks swell, just the slightest - that crack of a gap near the bow closing up by at least half its width - but there was hardly any other effect from it.

Foreign lands and foreign waters, but she only made contact with the one; she came in at the docks and they set out a gangplank, and even more men climbed aboard her.

They brought more barrels, one after the other after the other, with words and symbols burned into their outsides by a hot iron, and every one was tarried and marked off by a man with a counter’s chart and a thin moustache, and thinner eyes.

Barrel after barrel, they filled her until there was no more space, and her beams did not complain for the weight of it. She could have carried twice as much and still borne it proudly.

Her prow did sit a little lower in the water when she was loaded, the shell-bearer standing nearer to the dock than she had beforehand as the captain and the counting-man met near her to make their final discussions.

The counting-man cared little for her, though; he had no interest in ships, only their cargo - and even that was only secondary, his _true_ intrigue lying in the cargo’s _cost_ . The pennies saved and earned, those were what made a business - ergo, he made them _his_ business, and he cared nothing for the ship.

Nothing save for the fact that she’d arrived in the morningtime, and hadn’t been expected until eve.

“Fast,” the counting-man had commented, thin eyes fixed on his own papers as the captain signed them off and he followed by doing the same.

“Indeed,” the captain nodded, his hat and vest in proud position despite the warmth that they added to his attire. “Fast and sure.”

The counting-man double-checked his papers, and then pulled out one to hand to the captain before making his inauspicious goodbyes. “The new ones always are,” he stated quite plainly, and just as simply, left. There was no wave and no goodbye, no luck offered nor speed on the return journey; their business complete, he simply left.

The captain didn’t pause to watch him go.

There was plenty a wave and a goodbye shouted from the dock, anyway, the dockworkers and crewmen having shared a quick sip from a flask or two, a game of cards as the cargo was loaded, a bawdy tale or two.

With her prow deeper in the water, there was a chance that she might be slowed. A chance that she might flag under the new weight, might rest heavy on her haunches like a banker would, content to make her time slower.

Not so, though.

When the wind filled her sails they pulled taught, belling outward beautiful and smooth - their off-white hemp canvas caught the sun, off-white because it was less expensive than bleaching a whole sheet of the stuff and because she was not exactly a showpiece, though something to brag about. White sails were for the navy, for the rich, for the royals.

Hers weren’t white, but they looked no less gorgeous and powerful when the caught the wind. Off-white, tending toward yellowish-brown but looking beautifully natural for it, her sails caught sun and wind at once and drew her forward - and as they did, her prow raised proudly from the water, and she took to cutting the waves again.


	2. 02 - Triumphant Return, and Turnaround

The water rose up sharply at her bow, not unlike that first day - although, on her first day, she’d entered stern first. Still, the waters reacted with the same fervor, swirling madly around her planks as she pressed onward and onward, the wind at her back driving her.

She was faster than they expected.

The crew, they noticed it in a sensation in the pit of their stomachs, in a slight unsteadiness of their footing whenever the winds particularly caught her sails and sent her properly ripping through the waves; they would laugh, sometimes, or cheer, to be going so fast with their cargo holds full.

Seven days - six nights - she’d taken to get there; not a full journey, not all the way to the Indies, not ‘round the Cape, but a more moderate trial. Seven days and six nights through calmer and more well-known waters.

She returned it in five.

Favourable winds, said some; advantageous currents, said others, amongst the crew and elsewhere. There were those, though, who whispered belowdecks and patted her firmly on the beams, and said that she was made for the sea - that it was her grace and power which lent them the speed, not the winds or the waters.

Of course, she did not hear them, nor answer back, nor indeed know them in any way - save for the ways in which a rock might know water.

 

\---

 

After she was docked, lashed up to the moorings at her home port, there was much discussion.

Not near her, of course.

Elsewhere, off in the city, in a room filled with pipe smoke and black-dyed felted wool, gold chains prominently displayed on suits and carrying monocles or other paraphernalia on the other end of them; a room filled with people, the charters and the counters and the bankers of the company.

She was faster than they thought she’d be.

Faster than another vessel which had made the same journey, leaving at the same time and still out at sea - even though she’d docked that morn, and the sky overhead was now darker than any of the men’s vests, even then, the other vessel still had not returned, and they did not expect it for another full day or perhaps two.

Had not expected her until the same, as well.

She was to be the fastest, they’d said, and they were all quite delighted in how prophetic their words had been - they patted themselves on the back and congratulated themselves on a job so well done, as if they had sat with a charcoal stick in hand chewing the ends of their pipes down to nubs, as if they had stood with saws and drills and hammers, as if they had had anything whatsoever to do with her save for telling a man to ensure she was made.

They passed around an exquisite bottle, pouring out a toast for every man there - including the Captain, who didn’t know that the bottle cost more than he would be paid in a year, but he took his small glass with a strained smile.

He was not a social man. He had been set on that voyage not for his noteworthy skills of inspiring his crew, nor for his affability, but rather for his attention to detail.

They told him to make the toast.

Bereft of ideas, he raised his small glass and glanced around at the beady eyes which stared expectantly at him, and he said, “Gents… to the future.”

To the future, they chorused, to the future they toasted, and to the future, they drank. There was a great singular laugh from them, a guffaw as they felt the tingle of brandy mixed through with accomplishment.

Silence, for a few moments, as the Captain read out his list of notes - “list of gripes,” one charter muttered to another out of earshot, “and he should’ve been happier about it, too. Would it kill the man to smile?”

Another voyage was planned that night, and the Captain’s notes were sent to the shipyard, with instructions for them to be tended to.

The gap in her foredeck was daubed with thick pitch and a rope hammered in, a thin wedge driving it; the same pitch filled the hole where the knot had fallen belowdecks, and a simple cork was pounded into place, and a single link was added into the chains between her wheel and her rudder. The greases were all checked, the planks and sails - a half-dozen men and boys set upon her, crawling over her like spiders, inspecting her every beam and post.

They, all of them, missed the shard of glass stuck in the figurehead. On the cheek, near the ear - not so prominent as to be noticeable, of course - still lingering from the bottle which had been broken there.

New supplies were brought aboard, by the old crew. Another Captain, though, different from the last.

The new one was older, his hair whitening at the temples, skipping all intermediary shades from its native reddish-brown. He had freckled cheeks and narrow eyes, creased at the corners from sun and salt, and he went right to the top deck as the sun was rising.

His hands traced over her bannisters, touching but not moving her wheel. He glanced over every part of the helm and the surroundings with his hands, and he stood for a minute and held the bannister as he watched the sun rise.

Never spoke to her - not then, and not later - didn’t speak to the ship as some crew and some Captains are wont to do.

When the crew came aboard again in the morning, days after she’d docked up, he met each one with a glance on the deck and he shook hands with a key few.

Sailors were a sometimes-superstitious lot, and their next voyage was to be a greater one; around the Cape, to fetch back home spices and silks and more. Some of the men had been before, and some anticipated the prospect of return while others grumbled glumly that it was a foolish errand, or a fool’s one. Some had never been, but somehow had the same two reactions - excitement or anxiousness - and all of them had some little thing they did to ensure, in their minds, that the journey would go well.

A few of the men rapped a pattern out on her side, leaning over to strike knuckles against her hull planks in a variety of rhythms; some held trinkets in their pockets and thought that those would see them through, the silk kerchief of a lover or the dried foot of a chicken; some had liturgies to mutter below her decks or pewter crucifixes on leather thongs around their necks.

She, though, had no superstitions and no fears about it all; when they cast off the ropes and unfurled her sails, she reacted with prompt readiness and took to the waters again.

She’d been made for them, they said.

A similar course to the last, at first, taking them around past the same port which smelled of the chemicals they used for leather tanning there - but had far more than simply that to offer, of course. They did not stop, though, did not dock and take in all that the city had to offer.

Their destination was far distant.

The Captain and the First Mates had their charts, and their sextant; they took readings multiple times a day and made adjustments, plotted their course, followed along. All the things which good Captains and First Mates do.

Her galley filled with smells and smokes during the mealtimes, particularly as the sun was going down; when all the men came off of the decks and gathered there, and the huge iron pot would be hot full of something, and the men would chuckle and guffaw and slap at each other’s shoulders - it smelled of food and smoke from pipes and lantern and fire, it smelled of sweat and grease from the day’s work.

Songs filled the air, chants or bawdy ones - or sometimes both at once, either bawdy chants or bawdy songs and _separate_ chants - along with the sound of cards flipping or being slapped down, and the light clink of small coins.

At the day’s end, most of them had a celebration, to congratulate themselves for a day’s hard work done; but some had no such luxury.

The lookout up in his nest, serving his watch before he would climb down the ladder-pegs, his hands stiff with cold, to trade places with the next man on rotation. A crewman or two who preferred to avoid the crowd, one older man in particular who spent his time nestled in the nook at the extreme fore of the ship, just above the figurehead and behind the long bowsprit, whittling.

As well, the Captain, standing at the wheel and casting his eye on the horizon - his gaze looking for hints of cloud or other sails, or light. Anything out of the ordinary.

They were not restless either, of course. They traded out with one another, hand giving to hand as they worked their way through the night, and cots belowdecks being emptied of one warm body before a colder one made its way into the sheets to soak in what residual heat remained - there were none on the crew who were restless, of course.

Only she.

She alone continued throughout the night, and the day, and the night after and the _day_ after, with her sails swallowing wind and her prow devouring wave after wave, and they called her she.

A few of the more superstitious sailors amongst the lot took to calling her by her name as the days went on, patting her on a beam or plank before they went to assume their duties and begin their work - one lookout did so, laying a hand on her mast and murmuring, “Be with me, Isobel,” before he ascended the ladder-pegs and bit down on his lips and forced himself to carry on, refusing to admit to his terror of being in the crow’s nest so far above and with such motion.

Not that there really was a true _nest_ , not even in the naval sense of the term; no wooden basket with railings to spend a leisurely night in, but rather, a wider and thicker pair of pegs driven into the mast over which to hang the legs and then hug the mast close to the chest.

Hug, he did, most thoroughly, as if he worried he might be flung free into the sea - and, indeed, he did fear it.

To no avail, though. She was sure through the waves, and the motion was little, and he was not tossed aside.

“Thank you, Isobel,” he muttered as he made his way down to the galley with the sun setting over his shoulder, and he never looked to the lookout who took his place.

That one, though - his replacement - would be the one to spot the storm.

They were some many days out of port, with the sea surrounding, and by the Captain’s surmise - and with the First Mate’s agreement - they were coming within a few days of the Cape.

Cape Good Hope, they called it, but a few of the sailors knew better; they knew that it was only called _Hope_ because it was the first sign of such a thing, the first indication that one’s journey might be ending in success rather than disaster, and even though it was not the rough time of the year, those few sailors knew well the name that it had originally been given.

Cape of Storms.

Names were fickle that way, when people gave them: they would change, and shift, and the Cape of Storms became Cape Good Hope when a man decreed that it was so, and nobody ever asked the rocks or the trees whether they gave their assent to the change - just as no person would ever ask her, when they changed her name, when _Isobel Worth_ came to be painted over and replaced by another, most never noticed or knew or cared.

The same way most did not know or care about the Cape, and its once-name of Storms - but there was good reason it had been called that, in days gone by.

The lookout was the first to spot the squall, before the First Mate did; a call was sent out and a finger cast forward, with the sun gone from sight and only glowing over the horizon.

Cards were shoved away into packets belowdecks, and a large lid lowered onto the pot, and lanterns extinguished; every item they could think of was stowed away, as they began to make ready to fight the storm, and weather it - or, to fail, and to perish.

Still, tireless, she continued forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter began to make clear to me just how little I really know about ships - I thought I knew a fair bit, but then I'd go to name a piece and come up in confusion with no answer; and _then_ I started to ask myself if I'd made a mistake in calling her a "cutter" at the beginning, and perhaps I have, but I don't think so. It's a pretty variable class of ship, running from small personal vessels up to naval ships carrying a dozen cannons, so I don't think anything I'm going to write will be unreasonable for a craft like that.
> 
> Although, I also realized that I really don't know what sorts of routes they used to go places, where they stopped, _how_ they really sailed, so I'm mostly combining rough research and guesses with basic knowledge, and hoping it comes out alright. When it comes down to it, I'm in this one more for the writing than the minutiae - but if anyone out there loves ships and sailing and history and wants to correct me, please do, and I'll take all the information you've got!


	3. 05 - The Storm, and Landfall

The eternal assault the waves had always carried out against the land had, for a time, a different target as she made herself the focus of their tirade. The sea waters churned violently in front of her, around her, in her wake; wind-whipped into wildness, they thrust themselves up against her planks and dashed themselves on her hull.

Her prow still split them easily, cleaving through legions of rough waves and choppy seas - like a plow through soft earth or a phalanx through the battlefield she flew, her sails furled in save for a few small ones to bear her through the storm and keep her head straight, keep the waters running past her rudder and prevent her from being hog-tied and unable to move.

The men shouted, calls of worry at first and panic. Were the sails tied up tight? Were the proper ropes slacked, and the correct ones lashed tight; were the loose items stowed, were the barrels hauled down, was the bilge taking on too much water, was this sailor or that one at their post and doing their proper job?

She had no cares for all of that. All she knew was what she was immersed in, she knew only as a rock - by contact, a visceral means of meeting with the world.

She knew the winds as they tugged at her sails, furled and unfurled alike - one, tied too loosely, slipped free of its bonds and flapped sharply in the winds, pulling her to the side and raising shouts from the men below who scrambled to climb her rigging and fix it.

She knew the waters, smashing against her - waves rising up her hull and dragging down like the clawing fingers of the damned, desperate to bring her to join them down amidst the rocks and the sand that covered the sea-bed.

She refused, though. Refused as staunchly and resolutely as any rock, and in very much the same fashion - a man might challenge a rock to a duel, dare it to make the first move, but the rock will very simply refuse.

Refuse, quite simply, by continuing to sit.

The men dashed about in worry and fear on her decks and below them, through her rigging, tossing buckets of water aside or catching falling things with sea spray flying into their faces and eyes, but she had no fear and no worry.

Rain began to pelt at the boards, the beams, the sails, the sailors; small harsh droplets flung with speed by winds which whistled and screeched through every small passage they moved near, and the rain drops became almost bullets with their velocity. Projectiles of Mother Nature through which She made her fury known.

Her fury, much like the ship - the _Isobel Worth_ \- made her refusal known.

For centuries, people had ascribed great personality to forces of nature, and indeed to Nature Herself. Rivers bore Naiads, powerful beings of great delight, but fickle - as any river is wont to be. Trees had their own spirits, and the mountains and the lands themselves, and it was very true that there was power in all of these things.

Sailors were particularly superstitious, given their proximity to such strong and drastic diplays of the supposed Mother Nature’s mercurial forces, and many of them carried trinkets or muttered old sayings with the intent of softening the storm.

They were, first and foremost, though, sailors - and their Captain was not one for superstition.

Grizzled and even sometimes grim from a life at sea, he set his eyes narrow against the gale and the storm and he held firmly to the wheel, and called out orders in an attempt to make himself known over the winds’ wails.

“Catch that line! Let slack - more - steady!” His words were picked up by others and shouted in turn, relayed along the deck right up to _Isobel_ ’s long bowsprit and back again, and the men scurried to do the commands’ bidding.

A particularly large swell raised her up, pointed her at the skies as lightning flashed and split the dark clouds above. Her planks and beams groaned in protest as the swell passed her by, her weight hanging forward until she ran down the wave’s far side.

Her bowsprit was almost half as long as she was, that thin protrusion like a narwhal’s horn, and it dove into the water as readily as any duellist’s rapier; it plunged into the seas its entire length in a retaliatory strike, making its vengeance known against the waves which had so thoroughly beaten upon her - it sank in to the hilt, and past that, as the sea rose over her foredeck and tried to swallow her whole.

The few storm lanterns on deck - caged and carefully caulked to keep out any wind or rain, fuelled by oil and with only the smallest labyrinthine escapes for the wick’s smoke and fumes - were immediately extinguished by the water, both the wave and the rain’s redoubled pelting, and the men shouted out as they were caught by the waves and the sea made its attempt to drag them away.

Hands caught hands, or ropes, or bannisters. One man’s fingers caught in a gap in the deck planks, opened up by the twisting she did to avoid the worst of the onslaught of the winds and waves.

She was sure, though, and steady; she had been made for a life _atop_ the waves, and would not so easily succumb to them.

Waters sloughed off of her like a monument, glistening in the light of the flashes of storm above her - the only light shed, with the lanterns extinguished and the stars blocked by cloud - and she lifted out of the water like a child’s toy, further than needed, baring a few feet of hull with hints of seaweed and a barnacle or two to the night before she slapped back down to float well.

The Captain called out to the crew again, the wheel trying to spin under his hands as her rudder tried to shift; he gritted his teeth and held it, her chains groaning, but a wave slapping against the side knocked him just loose enough for the spokes to be ripped free of his hands, just for a moment as he caught himself from falling.

Freed from control, her rudder slewed to the side, right to the stops. The crew who had barely managed to regain their feet cried out again as she listed heavily to starboard - they let fly her ropes, robbing the wind’s ability to drag her down to lay on her side in the water like an ill cow in the fields.

The Captain regained his footing and caught the wheel in hand, just in time to see another swell approaching from the port side. He tried to swing her wheel but could do so no further, her rudder already against the stops, and a triumphant laugh flew from his throat as she rode the swell and righted herself atop it - her rudder cupped the uge wave’s forceful thrust and turned it, and turned _her,_ until she was upright and foreward atop the swell and in good position to ride down its far side.

The men let up a joyous cry as she did, and this time they braced themselves as she impaled the raging sea; they caught bannisters and ropes or threw their arms into nets or rigging as her long rapier of a bowsprit pierced the rough waves once more - and, once more, she rode under the wave but bore it and rose back up triumphant a moment later.

They still called out, they still shouted - the crew. There was not the same panic of worry in their collective voice anymore, though.

Now they shouted with triumph.

Their cries were jeers now, taunting the storm and the winds as they failed to rip the ship asunder. They laughed in mockery every time a wave rose over their side, sloshing over the deck, and they did the same every time they tossed a bucket of water over the side like prisoners in some war being sent home in humiliating defeat, robbed of all their strength and brutishness and reduced to simply being some slop in a bucket.

The Captain kept a tight hold on the wheel, still, but he let it shift a little in his grip whenever the rudder tried to haul over - no desire to be thrown to his knees again.

The storm tried its damnedest - or, at least, so all of the men aboard would have said afterward - to sink the ship, to take her and bury her so far under the waves that she would never know the wind in her sails again, to rip her rudder from its hinges and shatter its chains through sudden jerks and twists, to leave her directionless and reeling to run up on the rocks.

The storm tried its damnedest, they would say.

Of course, it could not really _try,_ no more than a rock could really refuse. No more than she could truly _know_.

In a way, though, they did.

The storm did try - it tried with waves to drag her under, it tried with winds to blow her over or rip her sails and snap her masts, it tried with swells to topple and break her, and she refused.

She refused with the pitch caulked into her hull which kept the waters’ fury at bay, she refused with the sway of her rudder which took force off of her chains, she refused when the men let slack her ropes to let the small sails fly loose and reduce the winds’ capacity to do harm with them.

The storm tried to destroy her, and she refused.

It was the height-feared lookout who first gave a hoarse cry - when she ran down a long swell and straight through a short sharp wave, splitting it like an axe cleaving a beast. In his excitement, he shouted out, “Attagirl, Isobel!”

The other men took to it, quite fittingly, like a ship to water. Like she to the storm.

Every wave which failed to drag them under, they caught the loose items and shoved them under nets as they cheered, “Attagirl Isobel!” Every gust which sent her listing to the side only for her hull to slap proudly down back on the water when sails slacked and the Captain swung her rudder ‘round, the crew stomped a foot on the ground and threw a fist into the air in triumph and called, “Attagirl, Isobel!”

She didn’t hear them, but she knew the stamp of their feet on the deck as a rock would know rain. She knew their chorus of shouts as a valley might know an echo. She knew their joy as a flower may know the sun.

Sea and ship have a complex relationship. The ship rides upon the sea and entreats her to be calm, and oftentimes, the sea will be; but, in time, the sea will try to destroy the ship, and leave her to fight or to founder. It is an eternal struggle, which can only ever end one way for the ship.

In the long run, at least.

 _Isobel Worth,_ they called her - she, they called her, and she survived the storm. That storm, that night, that time, she survived and did not sink beneath the waves, but nor did she slay the storm or the sea.

The sea always survives such encounters. Even in failure, it still survives, and a victory for the ship does not mean the battle will never happen again.

Only a failure means that.

Still, as she sailed out of the far side of the storm - as the lightning-flashes and thunder-thumps began to be _behind_ her instead of _around_ her - the men let up a fierce cheer and took to a chant, an old shanty that sailors often called in such times, and they treated it as a victory.

They laughed and cheered and clapped each other’s backs as they cleaned up the mess of strewn objects, they chuckled and jeered back at the storm fading into the distance as they unfurled sails, they talked and patter her on the beams as the First Mate’s lighter was produced to light the storm-lanterns once more, and they did so as if they had _won_ and would never need to fight a storm again.

The lanterns did not want to light, but the First Mate’s lighter was full of oil and gave a steady flame, and in a few minutes it had dried the wick of one and lighted it, and was passed on along to the next, and the next.

Within ten minutes or so, they had the three storm lanterns lit and they could focus in earnest on cleaning or righting all that had been made wrong, and in bailing out the bilge in earnest. _Isobel_ had taken on water and ran a few hands lower in the seas than normal - another two planks, perhaps, that were normally pristine above those which carried a faint greenish tinge of slime from their time in the water.

No moreso than when she’d been loaded with tea, though, and she ran through the rougher-than-normal waves with just as much ease.

The Captain alone didn’t partake of the crew’s joyous celebration - he called out to them that they’d done well, and other commands, but he never shouted out her name in triumph to the night and never jeered to the storm.

Not a superstitious one, he kept his hands on her wheel and shifted it slightly, felt the bit of slack which had been instilled by the storm stretching her chains and resolved to have that fixed when they made port, and he didn’t speak to her.

Although, a while later - taking over command from the First Mate who’d been nearing the end of his shift when the storm had struck - as she sailed off into smoother waters and pitch-black night, and when nobody else was around to see it, he did reach out a hand and pat it on one of her bannisters as a father might endearingly pat a child’s head.

No words, but that at least, he offered her.

She took it as she took everything else: in stride, as she continued to split waves under her prow.

Some boards had been pried up, one spoke of one of her bannisters was shattered where a falling sailor’s leg had shot through it, the sails that had been left out were fraying around their grommets - numerous small damages, but nothing that would keep her from running the waves. Only small reminders of the force of what she’d endured.

Still, though, that small shard of glass remained embedded in the carved maiden’s cheek; it had weathered the storm just as surely as she, and it remained in place just as stolidly.

Uncaring, unknowing, unminding, she sailed off into the night as the sailors descended into her belly for a round of song and rum before they largely went off to sleep.

There were a greater than normal number of hands patting at her beams next to cots that night.

 

\---

 

The damage was greater than originally thought, though not as bad as had been feared.

A few members of the crew had been injured during the storm and it was required to find other jobs and tasks for them to perform - one had broken his arm, even, and it was unknown whether he or the arm would survive. There was no true doctor aboard, but one who had some experience with the sort of thing did splint the man’s arm up with a few scraps of wood and a thick piece of spare sail canvas.

She had sustained her injuries as well. Boards which had popped up were hammered back down flush again, as best the crew were able. Some paint peeled from her sides where the sea had been particularly rough, and had perhaps carried some bit of flotsam that struck her firmly.

A few climbed her rigging with needles clutched between their teeth trailing thick thread to the breeze, and they pulled tight the small rips in her still-soaked sails that the storm had instilled, and they shored up the tired grommets of the smaller sails which had been left flying throughout.

The lookout, up the top of her single mast, kept a particularly careful eye on the horizon and on the coast. All the men were anxious to make land, and the idea of stopping in some natural bay for some small repairs was tossed around, but not for long and not with much fervor.

They soldiered on, and the galley stayed filled with scents of smoke and stew - and there was still laughter and chants, from time to time, but it did give way to grumbles as well. Long times at sea required a certain sort of man, a certain sort of mindset, to keep from becoming crazed or violent.

She had no such concerns, of course.

The sun came out more clearly in the days following that storm, and it dried her sails and lifted spirits of the men who began again to whistle as they swabbed the sea spray from her decks and tended to her rigging with care.

Another few squalls blew over her, but nothing nearly as violent as the first; no lightning and no waves the size of her or greater, no furious tempest the likes of which spoke of the furies of the Heavens themselves - only cloud and wind, whipping white caps onto the waves.

They furled her larger sails and carried on, and the faster winds pulled her along. With her mainsail rolled, the headsails stretched out onto her bowsprit alone caught the wind and pulled her prow high in the water where it skipped across the waves rather than splitting through them.

Under the Captain’s direction, the crew made a few changes in her rigging and raised her prow even further, and she began to fly across the water’s surface as if she were skimming it - as a child’s stone flung across a placid lake.

The whittler who so enjoyed sitting at her bow had no need to blow free the shavings from his work anymore; the wind of her passage alone pulled every curl of wood immediately free, sent it scattering into the air and back along the decks where it would be disposed of by the swabbies who grumbled every time they caught one up in their scrub brushes.

The nervous lookout held even more tightly to her mast, clutching it to his chest as it his life depended on it with the colour draining from his face, and he began to question whether it was truly a better life than working in the fields had been, as he’d hoped it would be.

They came upon the Cape to the surprise of some of the crew. The older ones who had made the journey once or twice before, who had counted days and weeks and months in their heads or as scratches on their cot-posts, thought that it was too early. They were still a week or two out, surely.

Grinning at the wheel, the Captain alone was unsurprised - he had plotted their course well, and while he’d not expected to round the Cape until that night, the adjustments to her rigging had evidently given them some speed.

Of course, _she_ was not surprised either, not in the slightest. She had the wind in her sails and she flew across the water like a heron skimming low, as they tugged at her ropes and swung her rudder to follow the coastline to the east.

More storms followed over the next week or two, but they began to lose their force - they carried far more water but with far less vehemence, their rains simply drenching ship and crew both and washing the salt free of her sails and her planks more surely than swabbies and rigging-climbers ever could.

 

\---

 

The ships were different, in the bay where she moored. There were two or three like her, of course, but there were also others - with low sterns and strange sails - but she neither knew them nor cared.

Some foodstuffs and other items taken out of her holds in barrels and crates and trundled out onto the dock. The water-barrels were brought ashore as well, what remained of them dumped upon the shore by sailors who tried not to pay too much attention to the slightly green tinge of what they’d been drinking and the thin coating of slime which had developed inside the barrels.

It was far more palatable with a bit of rum, anyway, and they hardly minded.

Here, though, they were to be given not rum but gin - a different drink more indicative of the region - and other exotic and strange things.

The crew dispersed, gladly taking use of all the town had to offer; they flew to the public houses for ales and songs, they rushed to the bath houses for hot water, they perused both and the streets as well for companionships that could be either won or purchased, and they reveled in it all even as their knees swayed uneasily with the ground’s level return.

She was left at anchor, new men taking to her rigging to inspect and repair. Ropes where replaced where they had stretched or frayed where they passed through block-and-tackle, or where they’d been repeatedly wound around the cleats which provided their anchoring.

The sails which had been left up during the first and worst storm were taken down and taken into a sailmaker’s who sat there with incense thick in the air and he painstakingly repaired every rip and tear - taking patches as needed and stitching them into place with thick strong thread, breaking loose the grommets and patching, and re-cutting holes, and installing new grommets.

He had a bowl of fruits near at hand and ate them almost constantly, one hand always holding while the other worked - or, in instances where both hands were needed, simply holding the fruit in his teeth and sucking at the juices as he did his work. Some would drip and dribble down his chin and into his scraggly beard, but not a drop ever fell on her sails.

After a few days, she was untethered from the dock cleats and taken to a beach nearby, at high tide - a thick rope was taken out to her in a small rowboat and carried up her single mast, tied to the top, and she was brought in toward land until her keel scraped the sand.

When the water ebbed away and they hauled down on the rope, she was left beached and careened - her hull, coated in slime and seaweed, barnacles and other spots of fouling, was displayed to the world for the first time since she’d slid down the ways and into the water.

A host of people swarmed around her with metal scrapers on poles, scrub-brushes, ropes thrown down her hull from the bannisters, and they chanted a song in a language that had never before resonated in her decks before. The holds and the galley sat at sharp angles, every item either secured or removed to prepare for the careening.

They worked through until the tide began to rise and lap at their ankles, scraping away weeds and barnacles, scrubbing free slime and salt, and then painting her with a thick mixture of pitches and oils and other things. By the time they finished, the water was raising again, and there was a host of soft almost-sighs of groans from her planks and beams as she settled into the water on her keel again.

Then, they spun her around to head in the other direction, and did the same thing again for the other side.

Her keel creaked as it laid down against the sand, her ribs and hull groaning as they took force in ways to which they were not often accustomed - she had been made for the water, not the land, but she could bear it for a while.

Much as a rock weathers a storm, simply by being.

They cleared off her hull and floated her out again, throwing free the thick hauling-rope and taking her back to anchor at the dock; her sails were returned, free of fruit juice spots and free as well from rips or tears, and the final inspections were carried out.

The water barrels were refilled, and her onloading began. Men brought aboard small kegs filled with strongly smelling spices, massive bales of tea wrapped in thick oil-soaked cloths and leathers to keep out the water, kegs of gin both for sale and for use on the journey back, crates of silks.

Directed by the Captain, they put the heavier things in her aft hold - the spices, the water, the gin, the food. Her front hold came to be filled with the lighter of the lot, the tea and the silks.

Freshly-painted, freshly-provisioned, freshly-repaired and cleaned, and so loaded, she rode out of the bay with her prow held proudly high and letting her grace her way across the waves once more.

Many waved from the shores, grateful for the shipment and for the excitement that a ship’s landing always brought, and they smiled and commented on the look of her as she strode out for sea - with the setting sun as her backdrop, they commented on how smoothly she split the water and how swiftly she moved, with how much grace, and they said that she had been made for the sea.

...and they called her she.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long work days and DnD sessions (amongst a few other things) meant no writing the past couple days, so I did a bunch extra today to compensate. Probably similar thing tomorrow.


	4. 06 - Hail, The Partridge, and Aid Rendered

The storms continued on her way back - the Cape holding true to its former name - but they all failed in their efforts to sink her.

One day, clouds and rough winds assailed them, and tore loose one of her headsails before they had a chance to slack it or pull it in, the jib that ran out from her mast and stretched along her bowsprit; it tore at the top and flapped out into the water, spreading across the sea’s surface like a mourner’s veil hiding their face until the crew hauled it back it and hung it from the bannisters to drip.

Another struck without warning in the night, clear skies above but rough seas and then, in the distance, flashes of lightning illuminating the land.

Hailstones began to strike at her hull and her decks, huge ones the size of a child’s fist; one of the storm lanterns was shattered by a lucky hit, her sails catching many chunks of ice without incident but sustaining a few holes in the process.

Her hull was undamaged, but some of her deck-planks were splintered. Men shouted and ran for cover, an unlucky few being bludgeoned bloody and then dragged to safety by comrades, streaking their blood across her decks.

The first blood that would ever spill upon her boards, but not the last - not nearly the last.

Not that she, or anyone else, knew it.

The hatch to below-decks was blocked when a stack of crates tied down to the side were knocked loose, spilling across the deck and trapping those belowdecks down there - not that most of them were trying to gain the deck. There were, however, many _on_ deck who were trying to leave, and now had no recourse to do so. They had no alternative save for to hunker down and hope, and pray, and mutter words to whatever god they chose.

More than one spoke her name, as well, pleading and intent; “Isobel.”

The First Mate stood firm at his post, a thick woolen scarf wrapped around his head to provide the best protection he could muster - he was called to by the crew, told to stand down and let her run free, to abandon the wheel and hide and find safety from the storm.

Next to him, a storm lantern glowed in the night and kept her upper deck lit with its soft glow. Lumps of ice struck the deck near him, struck the wheel, but he refused to abandon his post unless the Captain himself said otherwise.

Like grapeshot, the hail; like any cruel cannoneer’s sneering answer to a crowd of persons, the balls of hard ice had formed layer over layer high above and away in the thunderclouds until their masses became too great to sustain that cycle and they were ejected, sailing with fearsome velocity and trajectory both to fall upon the unsuspecting land.

Not that she, or any of the others, knew that; they knew only what they felt, only what struck them in the shoulder or the foredeck. They knew, all of them, only as a rock did.

The First Mate did not know of the formation of hail, of thunderstorms and their cyclical air currents - he did not know and did not care, they could have _been_ grapeshots and he would have held his position just the same. For hail or for shot, for musket-balls or for cannon-fire, he would not stand down.

An almost deafening din was sent up by the constant staccato smack and patter of the hail upon her hull, joined in with by the shouts and calls of the men. The storm lantern near him sizzled where sea-spray and small fragments of ice had fallen upon its glass, heated by the oil flame within, and the First Mate bared his teeth under his thick scarf.

Battered and bruised, but refusing to be beaten until he had no alternative, he stood his place right until a hailstone struck him in the hand and, in an instant, shattered it.

With a sharp yelp like a kicked hound he fell to the deck, his knees meeting wood like so much ice had as he clutched his broken hand to himself. A spoke was broken free of the wheel, splinters of wood falling onto him and catching on his scarf, but still he would not let her run free.

He shuffled forward, every motion accompanied by pathetic sounds but moving nonetheless; crawled on his knees until he could regain the wheel again and sit crouched behind its stand, half-sheltered from some of the storm’s fury, not knowing where the head was pointed but holding it there just the same.

Shouts and calls, back and forth - he to the crew and the crew to he as she groaned amidst waves and hail, her beams creaking in the rough seas; the crew called out that the lightning flashes were just to port off of the bow and the First Mate swung the wheel as best he was able from his huddled crouch.

Her rudder slewed in the water, churning up mad eddies as the sea tried to protest, but to no avail; she was strong and tight in her chains and the storm lacked the fury to slacken them, and her head pulled away from land.

When the men told him the flashes were off to port hard, he clutched the wheel tight and all but collapsed forward, desperate to do nothing more than hold the course true and maintain his consciousness.

He did.

The storm abated before morning - or they sailed out of it, either way - and as the sun rose, they looked as if they had been privateer’s victims or worse.

Red rising sun gleamed off of decks stained the same colour, washed with blood diluted with seaspray and melted ice; sailors slowly emerged from their positions with groans and shouts, and the First Mate fell to the deck completely as the Captain emerged from the now-cleared hatch and came to take the helm.

Sails struck through with holes but still flying true and proud, and her flag just the same. Splinters and shards of wood mixing in with the blood on her decks, unconscious men being dragged; part and parcel playing the part of any war-ship in the aftermath of a battle.

She’d come at least two-thirds of the way toward the land in the night, and had it not been for the First Mate’s actions, they all said, she would have run up against the rocks.

No person asked her about it, of course; if she would have done something to prevent it, thrown loose a rope from a cleat to slew out to sea again or swung her rudder down to save herself from the rocks - not one asked her.

She couldn’t have answered, anyway.

As they went about cleaning their own wounds and hers, another ship approached flying a similar flag; another crew from her homeland, looking also worse for the experience. They hailed her with flags, their own vessel listing off to one side.

Warily, the Captain signalled back for them to approach - they flew the flag, but these waters had Privateers and they knew no honour nor rule. It wouldn’t be below them to fly the wrong flag and dupe an unwary crew into falling prey to them.

At her home port, before the journey, she’d been made ready for this longer journey by the addition of several cannons - a pair of nine pound guns for either side, and a swivel gun in the bow.

The Captain sent up the call at the other ship’s approach - the men to stand ready at the guns, and ready they stood; not fighting men but sailors still, and every merchant on the sea knew that attack might come for them. Better to defend oneself and thus protect one’s cargo.

It soon became apparent, though, that the other ship was no Privateer. While she was larger and more heavy - two square-rigged masts and her hull having the doors for a dozen cannons on each side, along with a few on her quarterdeck - she was in rough shape as well.

Listing to one side, her sails truly in tatters; they called out when they approached, bemoaning their predicament. Heavy seas and their heavy complement had led to them taking on water through the gun ports, and their cargo had broken loose and shifted in the hold as well.

The Captain of the Isobel Worth considered the situation, but not for too long; the men of the other ship would be working belowdecks, fighting a battle on two fronts against the aftereffects of Mother Nature’s fury, bailing out water while trying to shift and secure cargo, and it was clear from the state of the other ship that they were fighting their battle to the loss at the moment.

Quickly, he ordered ropes tossed - they moored side by side and threw a plank across, with the Isobel Worth on the other ship’s high side just in case the situation should devolve further. The Captain wanted to help, but had no desire for his own ship and crew to be caught in the rigging and dragged down.

 _The Partridge_ , read the other ship’s stern - her aft deck a fair height above the _Isobel Worth_ ’s, with the covers of two gun ports at a level where they would have fired overtop of her decks even had the other ship not been listing off to the opposite side.

The crew of the _Isobel Worth_ crossed over the plank and descended into the belly of the other ship, urged on by its crew - they ducked low under unfamiliar beams and cursed as their feet caught on unfamiliar obstructions, and they did what they could to be of aid.

Chests of bullion and crates of silk and spices, small but heavy chests of unknown contents, filled the holds; stacks had fallen sideways and were being desperately reassembled by the crew who struggled to hold them in place against gravity’s pull even as the _Partridge’s_ list continued to let water seep in through its starboard gun ports.

Every degree that the _Partridge_ shifted was a point of friction against her hull. Their planks pressed against each other like embracing comrades, the ropes that ran between their bannisters like the grasp of a friend trying to keep another from slipping below the waves - as the _Partridge_ listed further the ropes pulled tight and lifted her a few hands higher in the water, but the crews efforts counteracted the shift and she was let back down before the Captain gave the order to cut bonds and sail free.

He wanted to help, he did; and if he could not, he wanted to survive, and to ensure the safety of what crew and cargo he could manage. The _Isobel Worth_ was not loaded nearly to the beams, she could take more in her holds and while any added crewmembers would mean strains on their rations of food and water, they would find some way to make it work.

If it came to that.

Her planks were scraped by barnacles, the section of the _Partridge’s_ hull that were normally underwater and covered thick with the shells rubbing roughly against her as the ship’s list was lessened, more and more, degree by degree.

Calls and shouts went back and forth between ships, relayed from point to point - a man in the bilge called out the water level and another on the ladder shouted it up, to the door leading onto the deck, where it was relayed to the Captains of both ships; orders from the Captain of the _Partridge_ were shouted in turn back down, and in to the cargo hold.

They spoke to each other, as well, the Captains of each ship. He of the _Partridge_ gave his thanks for the other’s stopping for aid, and he of the _Isobel Worth_ denied any grandness of the action and said he was doing only what was right.

The ropes between them, that tenuous grasp between the ships, their only means or method of holding tight to each other, began to slacken as the _Partridge_ was slowly righted until its masts were almost truly skyward.

Her beams and planks creaked and sighed with relief, with the lessening of strain - she had not been made to hold another afloat, but desperate times often call for desperate measures.

With the immediate emergency allayed, a trade was put forth; some cargo from the _Partridge_ brought aboard into the holds of the _Isobel Worth,_ and she sank another hand lower into the water at its weight but kept her prow just as high, her bowsprit raising up higher even than that of the _Partridge._

The sailmen onboard the _Isobel Worth_ ran up into the rigging of the _Partridge,_ tending to and mending her tatters; the chief medical man aboard the _Partridge_ came over to bind the shattered hand of the First Mate of the _Isobel Worth_ , and the sun shone proudly done upon them all.

Mother Nature often seems vicious, cruel, hell-bent on the destruction of the men within her and their constructs, but she often seems so glad in the aftermath of those who have survived. The sun follows the storm, glory shining upon the short-lived victory of those who’ve survived yet another trial, yet another day.

Drinks were passed ‘round and a shanty sprung up, bawdy and loud and filled with laughter - games of cards spread out across the decks even as they were still being swabbed and cleaned up, and every man amongst them was joyous.

Scraps of wood and splinters, pieces that had broken free of either ship, were gathered and set into a large metal pan on the _Partridge_ ’s quarterdeck and lit, and the men gathered around it to warm and dry themselves from the night’s storm and the morning’s sweat of work, and for a time, all was well.

It is the way of things, though, that there will always be another storm. There will always come a souring of the sun, and the cloud will come once more, and joy will give way to fear.

Sometimes, the storm is not even Mother Nature’s doing.

It was the greatly-feared lookout of the _Isobel Worth_ who first spotted the other sails, pointing and calling out - and at first, his shouts were swallowed up by the revelry on the decks below. They did not hear his shouts of sail, they did not hear his cries of attention, and they did not see the approaching vessel.

His motions caught the attention of the other lookout, onboard the _Partridge -_ a larger ship with greater amenities, she had a full nest up one of her masts where the man stood surrounded by a basket, and he had a large brass bell close at hand, and a spyglass tucked into a cubbyhole.

This man saw the sails as well, and drew out his spyglass - he spied the flags being flown, spotted the colours, and swung the bell’s clapper with furious strength. It clanged brightly, catching the attention of all those below - and the sound echoed out as well, racing over wavetops clear and swift.

The Captains looked over to see the other vessel beginning to turn, to face them broadside.


	5. 07 - A First Battle, a Last Battle

A clear sign of hostility, the approaching vessel’s crew having realized that their presence had been noticed - they heard the bell of the _Partridge_ as clearly as any of her own crew did.

Shouts of command rang out over the revelry, calls to fall silent and stand to stations as the approaching ship opened its ports and ran out its cannons.

Dozens of men scrambled over the other two vessels, footsteps both familiar and foreign falling on the deck planks of the _Isobel Worth._ The crewmen had spread between the two, their celebrations seeking every bit of space they could find, _Partridge_ and _Isobel_ joined by ropes and crew alike as both almost blended into one.

To their detriment and their benefit, as it turned out.

The _Partridge_ was the windward of the two ships, a piece of happenstance that meant little save for that it was the nearer of the two to the approaching vessel - approaching soon to be attacking as plumes of smoke erupted from its sides with huge thumps, the sounds racing back across the water as quickly and clearly as the brass lookout’s bell had.

These sounds, though, were followed expectedly by something more.

Both products of the same phenomenon, thump and ball; one faster but one far more physical, the thump frightened sailors and the ball delivered the reason for their fear as nine cannonballs slammed into the hull of the _Partridge._ Several more struck the water and threw up great plumes that glittered in the sun.

Her splintered planks shone in the sun, bright wood showing through the dark paint which had covered her - it was advantageous that she was the windward, the one bearing the brunt of the attack, for two reasons. She was the larger of the two, her hull and beams far thicker and more capable of taking punishment - and she was also the one with more cannons.

They rang out in response, rough barks of explosions that flung out smoke and cannonballs at once; not simultaneously, not in synchronicity, not with the practiced precision of a church choir singing out one single unified and exultant note - no, the cannons of the _Partridge_ made their response as a rabble would, as a mob or the patrons of a public house hours after the going down of the sun, they called back one after the other but with each one adding to the last, a dozen belowdecks and two more from the quarter.

Not every shot was a strike, of course, between the surprise of the crew of the _Partridge_ and her still ongoing slight list. In fact, the list was great enough that every one of the cannons belowdecks missed, plunging into water far short of their target.

One of the cannonballs from the quarterdeck flew true - a nine pounder, small by consideration of the rest of their armaments but at the same time the largest gun that anyone had placed aboard the _Isobel Worth._

One strike, answering nine.

The call came up from below, that the ship was taking on water again, and it was expected to worsen the list - the Captain gave the order to reload the cannons, to stack whatever could be pressed into service under their barrels to raise them, and then he called for volunteers.

From below had also come the word that the foremast had been damaged, a lucky strike from one of the cannonballs clipping the side of it and resulting in splintered wood and a dead crewman as well.

She would not be able to take the strain of a pursuit - they would not be able to let out her sails full, for fear of breaking the damaged mast, and they could not hope to escape without such power driving them onward.

In a moment, it was decided. _The Partridge,_ though she floated yet, was lost.

Her Captain pled desperately with the other, to take what crewmen he could and what fine cargoes, and save them - for Queen and for Country.

There was no need to state what he offered in return, and it was clear by the set of his boots on the deck that he would not be budging from his place.

Men rushed between decks again, several of the older ones going on board the _Partridge_ and trading place with faces less grizzled, less harried; a few whose eyes yellowed at the edges and doubted themselves of making the return journey went as well, along with one or two others.

The First Mate of the _Isobel Worth,_ for one.

“I’ve only one good hand,” he insisted at the protest of a few crew, “no good for us now in a chase but I can hold a linstock as well as any of you - now off with you, I’ll bear no further disobedience.”

There was no Court Martial for these men, no insubordination that could be settled by such things, but they took his command anyway and went.

The assailant sent out another volley of cannon fire, the plumes of the last still not quite dissipated - the smoke curled and wafted up into the air, obscuring her decks and her sails until it was forcibly dispersed by the arrival of a newer, fresher cloud of the same.

Dull metal reflected the sun imperfectly, the rough spheres soaring through space overtop the water which caught the light so much more clearly than they ever could, but they had never been made to reflect. They had been made for only one purpose, and they carried it out with the abandon and determination of an avalanche making its way down the mountain, with the ferocity and dedication of any storm.

Splinters flew as cries did, screams intermingling with the sound of shattering wood, and the call was given to cast off lines. The plank was abandoned to slip off into the water - crewmen still onboard the _Partridge_ ran and leapt from her bannisters in hopes of making it on to what they hoped would be their saviour, the _Isobel Worth._

Some of them succeeded.

Hands grasped hands, or some caught on wood or hanging ropes, and managed to grip tightly and long enough to haul those sailors aboard, but others were left to fall into the water like missed cannon shots with much the same future ahead of them.

They swam and shouted out, and lines were thrown down to them, but there were other pressing concerns which took precedent as the crew went about making ready for their escape.

Another thunderous round of firing from the _Partridge_ shook every timber of the _Isobel Worth;_ a wordless shout of goodbye that made her beams briefly creak and shudder as if in sympathy for her momentary friend.

Her head turned away, though through no intent on her part, of course.

The lookout let out a triumphant cry - one of the assailant’s three masts had been struck near the middle and toppled, but they still had plenty of sail with which to run and time was not on their side.

Behind them, the _Partridge_ turned and headed toward deeper water - the Captain determined to give the Privateers not a dram of her cargo, but he made a line more toward the assailant as well with a darker purpose in mind.

The assailant had only one broadside to offer, and they turned it to face at the _Partridge_ . It brought the fleeing _Isobel Worth_ within sight of her bow chaser, though - a long nine nestled in the crook of her bow which the crew hauled on the tail end of in order to swing around for a good line on their quarry.

Halyards were run out as hard as any of the sailors had ever run a line, and _Isobel’s_ sails lifted high to the skies; off-white but gleaming still in the sun as they caught wind and curved out, and began to bear her forward.

The instant she caught wind, her prow raised even higher in the water, a thin green sheen displayed to the still-rising sun as she began to do what she had always done so well.

The chests which had been brought aboard - jewels and gold, for the most part - had been set in her aft hold where space permitted, and the Captain ordered all men at the ready where they could.

She had no chaser cannon, nothing at her stern to give one final report with - her swivel gun could be moved to there, but had no hope of making the distance back to the battle that was ensuing behind them.

There was only one option for her, and that was flight - and fly, she did.

Her planks slapped against the low waves, scudding across the water’s surface as her sails breathed wind more and more, every inch laid on to give the best possible speed.

Sailors - particularly those from the _Partridge_ who were unfamiliar with her - grasped onto bannisters or rope cleats to keep from falling, and a few let out a soft cheer as they thought themselves saved.

The _Partridge_ and the assailant exchanged one last volley of blows, from closer now than before, and the _Partridge_ was sitting lower in the water than she should be. Not listing too heavily but far too low to make good speed, particularly with her sail only a little more than half-hoisted.

Her capture seemed to be a foregone conclusion, but none of the men aboard the _Isobel Worth_ wished to wait around to find out the truth of it.

Neither did she herself, of course.

Every part the opposite of her ailing compatriot who took on water behind her, she sat high-prowed in the water. The added men and added weight sank her stern some, but they shuffled on deck to keep her bow up and keep her nose from dragging in the water, to keep her rudder carving low and full and deep in the sea.

It worked, as well, and she gave swift flight away. She had been made for the water, they said, and she took to it so easily that one couldn’t doubt that the sea was her fate.

Far back, the long nine of the assailant let out its first and only report - roughly sighted in a coin toss of a hope to luckily cripple their fleeing prey, and to that end, not loaded with a single ball.

One ball either hit or missed, and unless one had the luck of striking the mast clearly, it was very unlikely to slow a ship in any noteworthy way.

Instead, they fired grapeshot.

So like the hailstones that had besieged her the night before, splintering planks and battering sailors, but even moreso; a dozen iron balls whipped through the air with every bit of the force and more, and far more mass and solidity.

A last effort, a final hope of severing lines and halyards, of damaging sails and perhaps even striking lucky on the wheel.

She was fast, though, and she was sure on the waves, and she did not fall prey so easily.

Two of the shots hit the planking of her stern, lacking the force to puncture completely but cracking and splintering just the same. One stuck in place, wedged between two splintered boards.

Most of them hit the water, sending up small chutes of mist which quickly fell flat again. Three hit the sails and punched small neat holes through them, and one hit a sailor with immediate catastrophic effect - but only the one.

Neither he, nor she, felt any pain at the strike; she bore her wounds without fear or injury, and he succumbed to his before any such pain could be felt, and still she flew.

They sailed at full speed away, mostly not looking back - the men had other tasks, largely. The lookout of the _Partridge_ had come aboard and brought the spyglass, and climbed the mast to see back; he didn’t call out what he saw.

When the assailant approached the _Partridge_ and unleashed a barrage from devastatingly close - so much so that he could see plumes on the far side of the _Partridge_ from balls that had pierced her clean through - he said only that they were making good speed away.

When dozens of small puffs of smoke spoke of flintlocks and boarding instead of cannon fire, he called down only that they were leaving their chaser far behind.

When there came no more plumes, he put the spyglass down.

She flew swiftly until the sails were clear of the horizon, and afterward as well - men climbed into her rigging and patched the small holes in her sails, and they clapped hands on shoulders in commiseration for the losses.

The First Mate of the _Partridge_ took out a flask from his coat and held it up, and asked the Captain of the _Isobel Worth_ for the name of her First Mate - he called it out proudly to the sea and the sky, and then the name of the Captain of the _Partridge_ as well, and tipped the flask back to the men’s memory.

He passed it around to the others, who shouted or murmured the names and touched the flask of Scotch Whisky to their lips, and by the time it had gone twenty men along there was nothing left in the flask but still many who had not toasted.

Not a one of them mentioned that the tin had gone dry. Every single one tipped it back as if it was bottomlessly full, a never-ending font of liquor and good spirits, and every one of them said the name of the two men - and a good number added the names of one or two others as well.

Even the Captain did partake of the gesture, though only in gesture. He did not even touch the flask to his lips, but he called the names and tipped it back before handing it to the next, and his grip on the wheel didn’t slack until the sun was setting again.


	6. 08 - Charts and Drought

Her return journey was not without its trials, to be sure.

With the conflict left behind them, there was nothing but sea and uncertain months ahead of them.

She’d not been designed, nor outfitted, nor most pressingly _supplied_ to take on as many men as she had.

The Captain called the First Mate - formerly of the Partridge, but now with no other ship to call his save for she, the _Isobel Worth_ \- into his cabin one night to discuss it.

A lantern lit the small space, little more than two chairs and a table between them meant primarily for charts. There was one tacked there, as it had been throughout the journey, with lines sketched in charcoal pencil showing their progress.

The Captain had taken a reading at the going-down of the sun, his sextant as stable in hand as any marksman’s rifle, and he marked down his best guess based off of that as to where the attacking vessel had come from.

Her planks and beams creaked around them, softly, as she cradled them and rocked gently on the waves - as if to lull them to sleep, but neither of them followed any such impulse just yet.

Once more, paper and charcoal played such a great part in her story; these lines would never be gone over in pen, though, and it was not so much her fate in the balance as her crew.

Of course, without any crew, she would likely founder on the rocks or simply sail aimlessly into the sea.

The Captain drew a line back toward home, taking up his divider compass in hand and setting them to what he could presume as their normal distance covered in a day or some approximation of the same. Small marks dotted the legs of the journey already covered, and he set the points to around the length between those marks, taking several as an average indicator of the rest and subtracting a small margin for the added weight of the ship.

It would not account for wind, nor storm, nor anything else, but it served as a swift and rough approximation - and, they would be unlikely to make substantially _better_ time than that anyway.

Then, starting from the mark which showed their position that nightfall and moving outward - on along the path toward home, one metal point setting down against the chart before the other rose up and the divider swiveled around, a hundred and eighty degrees, and again, and again.

Point by point, day by day counting off their journey home, until all at once the metal points ceased their walking and stayed solid against the parchment.

“That’s where we run out of food,” the Captain murmured - mused, more than anything else, and the compass was not yet two thirds of the way toward home.

“We can ration some, surely,” the First Mate suggested, “but the bigger problem of course-”

“Water,” the Captain interjected, confirmed with a nod, and then sighed and walked the compass forward another seven increments. “And rationing’s worth an effort, but I’m not sure it will suffice. The crew’s nearly doubled and their appetite accordingly - and we’ve slowed for it, as well. We won’t be sure of how much until a few more days’ travel, but still…”

“We’ll need to make landfall, then.” The First Mate’s voice was thick with his native accent, as peaty and smokey as the Scotch whisky he’d carried in his flask and hailing from the same lands.

He pulled out the flask in question before recalling its fate, its emptiness, and sighing before he shoved it deep back into his pocket again.

Neither of the two, though, wished to be any slower in their return home than they needed to be.

“Aye, if it comes to that,” the Captain sighed, moving his dividers point over point again to map out the remaining length back home as his other hand rubbed a thumb against his chin bearing a day’s worth of stubble.

Neither knew whether they would be able to ration their food and water to last, just as neither knew what else the journey home would hold - as neither had known the Privateer was to attack, as a rock doesn’t know anything save for what it butts up against.

They, though, unlike a rock, could hope.

Unknowing of their plight and in no concern of starvation herself, _Isobel_ carried off into the night with small sea waves scattering off of the planks of her prow and glittering briefly in the moonlight until she ran the spray down to join its fellows in the sea proper.

A few of the men tried to fish over the side, but to no real avail. A few attempted to snare or shoot one of the seabirds that sometimes circled near, and they even managed that - but as the net wrapped around its wings and pulled it down to the deck, its cries warned off the others to fly away.

They roasted it that night in the galley, and they laughed over it, but every man ate less of it than he wanted.

Less of everything, in fact. Those who had no pressing purpose, whose jobs were considered secondary or perhaps had no job whatsoever, they were told to stand down as much as possible. To spend their time belowdecks where they could, spare themselves the sun’s heat, and reduce their hunger and thirst as greatly as possible.

The food and water were both carefully measured in the galley, as precisely as any naval man’s tot ever was, but beyond that they went about their normal lives where possible.

The whittler still carved at his wood, but no longer huddled up near the bowsprit - he retreated instead to the more private but also more disgusting bilge, sitting on the lower steps but still above the water and letting the shavings fall to float on its surface.

Her sails continued to run high as they stretched her for everything she was worth - a call of that had gone ‘round at one point, “give her all she’s worth, boys,” and laughter had ensued. A moment of not considering how the common phrase aligned with the ship’s given name, and the men’s spirits were lifted for it.

They began to call back and forth to each other, sometimes, on the deck; “What’s she worth?” “An Isobel’s Worth!”

It was as much of a joke as any of them were willing to make in regards to their predicament.

Careful attention was paid to all of her ropes and sails, all the moreso than normal; any indication of fraying was taken very seriously and addressed with immediacy, because a single snapped halyard or shredded section of sailcloth might mean the difference between starvation and survival. Between thirst and slaking it.

As time carried on, the men became more glumly resigned; in an effort to raise their spirits and hopefully cut down on the rations of food and water as well, two boons in one fell swoop, the Captain ordered an extra barrel of gin opened.

He knew that he would be held accountable for it, that its intent was to be sold back at home port, but _making_ it there was more important than what they would do afterward.

If it came to it, he was willing to let them take the barrel’s price from his pay.

It lifted the men’s spirits for a while, and they were careful not to spill a drop - not of the gin, and not of the precious little fresh water, and not of any crumb of their food nor the more and more common soups which the cook had taken to making from seawater and neglecting to add any salt; not a drop and not a crumb fell to her deck’s, not a speck being ground into her boards by careless footsteps.

No easy task, running a ship on a stomach which grumbles and yearns for more even while one’s mouth sits dry and unsatisfied, but they managed it decently enough.

At least in part because she seemed to want to run, ever so much.

Even with the added men, even with the added weight, her prow skipped and slapped against low waves and dashed through whitecaps when they rose; her bannisters bore views of their own blurred reflections on the wavetops, and the men would often cheer her on when the thought occurred to her.

Some small storms meant little for risk, but did slow them as they furled her sails, not wanting to risk one tearing in the least. They brought an upside as well though, in the form of their water.

The crew sat on the decks with their mouths open and heads tipped back like children when snow-flakes fall; they laughed and exclaimed in joy at every cool drop which fell onto their tongues, and they hauled up the barrels to the deck to fill with as much rainwater as they could.

It was not much, not more than a few inches, but it was something for their spirits at least. Hearing a barrel that had run dry slosh again brought them new hope and joy.

There was talk of making landfall and searching for water or food, but between the idea that the Privateer might be in pursuit and the idea that any coastline might have hostile natives peering out from the bushes, the men decided that they weren’t yet that hungry or thirsty.

They made it home, anyway. A full three weeks sooner than the Captain had expected.

She was made for the water, they said.


	7. 09

She was given an immediate berthing and prompt attention, the careful eyes of many attending to the wounds she’d sustained. Her sails taken down once more to be patched in earnest, her lines and ropes run through every inch to check for damages which resulted in several being discarded, every blank and beam and spar of her inspected.

Crawling on her like insects on a cow, and treated with just as much indifference - her sails fluttered like a cow’s eyelashes or tail might, until they were removed; her prow rose and dipped in the water, as a cow’s jaw would do, but instead of grassy cud she worked over only water.

The cargoes were removed and accounted for, all, and a runner sent for whatever officer the nearest detachment was willing to send.

Wearied and hungry crew fled her like rats might had she been set ablaze - they rushed off and clutched at land, they who had been on the  _ Partridge, _ and they said another word for fallen comrades, but little would deter the from grumbling stomachs and dry tongues all.

The public houses were more busy than normal that night, the standard glut of sailors offloading a ship being redoubled by both a greater number aboard, and a greater percentage in need of food, and drink, and comfort.

The staff struggled to cope, but cope they did, and the wooden dance floor creaked with footstomps and the rafter beams rang clear with song.

Every man was there, every one from the ship - save for the Captain.

He sent a boy off for a jug of water and a plate of meats: fowl, he specified, and he wasn’t picky about the sort of it but he wanted it cooked and cold and unseasoned.

Something he could devour ravenously, with no concern for spilling gravy or stew slop, no caution needed to avoid burning his tongue, no decorum required to prevent elaborate garnishes from falling onto his shirt and no spices to catch in his nostrils and force a sneeze and thus slow his eating.

He held to the bannister of the  _ Isobel Worth _ as much out of a requirement to stay standing as anything else. Had his hands slipped, he would surely have crumbled to her deck, but he refused to do so.

Able men scurried about her, men from the shore, and he stood as if supervising them but seeing little of it - in his head were two speeches being rehearsed, one for the detachment’s officer, and one for the moneyholders of the company.

It was the latter that he was more worried about.

Small shouts and quickly spattered foosteps spoke of the boy’s return, and the Captain’s eyes drew down to the shore to see him - dashing between folks who wandered and wondered alongside the docks, the urchinlike child dodged elbows and other body parts like a starling darting between branches of a tree. He nearly bowled over an old man who shook his cane in fury with a shout, but the child kept running, flying up the plank and onto the decks - he sprinted, nearly slipped, struck a rigger who was checking some of the ropes, and was summarily caught by the collar by the same.

Thick, rope-handling hands clutched at the rough fabric of the boy’s shirt, just for a moment, just for long enough for the other hand to come around with an accusing finger jabbed in accompaniment with chastising words, before the hands let go and the boy was running off again.

The rigger’s hand flew and knocked him on the back of the head, but lightly - not firmly enough even to knock the boy’s cap  _ off _ but merely to knock it askew, and as the rigger turned back to his task it was with a slight chuckle and a hidden smirk as he recalled his own days of impulsive youth.

Panting and red-cheeked - from both exertion and embarrassment due to his momentary internment, the Captain suspected - the boy presented the water and meat to the Captain.

He didn’t have the strength left in him to tell the boy to leave, to retreat to his cabin and eat in peace - he only offered a slight nod, glanced around, and then turned to face the opposite direction.

The thick slices of roast bird were devoured in moments, as quickly as gnashing teeth and a gulping gullet could dispose of them, and large mouthfuls of water washed them down on their way to the Captain’s straining and aching stomach.

Somewhat to his surprise, the representatives from the military - not just an officer from the local detachment, but several of his men as well - were the first ones to find the ship.

Clearly recognizable through the crowd not just for their bright uniforms but for the space which was afforded them as well; they moved through people like ducks through water, and like water from a duck the crowd simply slid past them, never clinging or sticking.

A crisp salute, and then a shake of the hands, and the men began to converse. The officer had questions loaded like musketballs and snapped them off, and the Captain answered with volleys and salvoes of answers of his own; the recruits who had accompanied looked quite as lost as the runner-boy as they watched the exchange.

Unminded around them, the business of dealing with a ship continued; ropes, wood, paint and lacquer all attended to as cargo continued to be unloaded. The officer instructed the cargoes salvaged from the  _ Partridge _ \- salvaged, that was the word he chose to use in his command, which drew a sharp look from the  _ Captain _ but no correction - brought to the deck with them for his inspection.

Inspection and, subsequently, guard.

Gold and jewels, chests of them, and the questions abruptly shifted.

The Captain’s practiced and smooth facade began to twist, weakened by fatigue and hunger, when the officer abruptly changed from interrogating to accusing - he shouted back that of course he had not run up the  _ Partridge _ and boarded her, and robbed her; there were dozens of men, her former crew, who could attest to that.

The officer countered that it could have been a mutiny, or the men simply liars; the Captain took the position that he could not possibly have overtaken such a more heavily armed foe with his light complement, and the officer only sarcastically said that he might be  _ quite _ the tactician.

A call from down the stern ended their debate’s stalemate, and the officer commanded his men to stand guard over the valuables while he and the Captain both went to the aft bannister to see what the fuss was about.

A rope hung down there, slung around the bannister with a slip knot of sorts for easy removal - from the other end of the rope hung a child with a bucket tied to his hip, but it was not a chip of paint that had encouraged him to call the others over.

Small fingers tugged splinters free from her planks, loosening shards of wood and letting them drop into the lightly undulating sea below to which all things go in time; the damage from the Privateer’s final salvo of grapeshot had been noticed, and one thing more than that.

Not just the damage, but a remnant of its source.

Caught there, between two boards where lucky placement had interred it; pinched between her planks where fate had decreed it would rest for the months of journey homeward, was a single ball of the grapeshot.

Weighing a bit under a pound, it was not a massive piece of iron but certainly not insubstantial - small enough that the child hanging down the ship’s stern was able to pry it lose and take it in hand, and hold it up for the men above to see.

The officer demanded it be brought up to the deck, and the Captain - excited at the prospect of clearing suspicions - hauled the child up by the rope that held them in place.

The two of them gathered around the piece of shot, huddled over it like brigands over a fragment of a map leading them to riches or like schoolboys over some piece of contraband they weren’t meant to have at school, shoulder to shoulder so they wouldn’t block it from the light, and the Captain rolled it slowly over and over in his hand, their eyes searching its surface for every mark or indication.

After a few moments, the Captain found what he was looking for - with a laugh, he straightened up and plucked the shot from his own palm, and slapped it down in the officers.

“I’d need to be  _ quite _ the tactician, I’d think,” he chuckled, “to be using armaments from an entirely other country, sir.”

The officer looked down to the piece of munition in hand, the caster’s mark clearly stating its Dutch origins, and he looked at it for a moment before palming it and straightening up.

“You’re to be commended for your quick thinking, and being the saviour of so many souls.” The officer’s eyes held no hint of lingering malice or suspicion, and his voice was only that practiced one of a career soldier. “A further investigation will, of course, be conducted. It is my assessment, however, that you’ve done right by the Queen and by God, sir - enjoy this night as you would. I’ll return on the morrow at noon with word of what will happen next.”

There was nothing that could shake the Captain’s grin as the officer retreated down the plank - leaving his men to guard the chests of gold and jewels, as there was too much for them to bear on their own.

He watched as the crowd again parted to let the officer pass, and did notice that a few more eyes were directed his way now, but he hardly cared.

“If you join the military, lad,” the Captain said with a chuckle and a glance down to the errand-boy, “be sure and make it the  _ Navy, _ now.”

The boy only nodded swiftly, prompting the Captain to laugh and pat him on the cap, and send him off on his way.

Below her, the sea continued its slow but eternal rise and fall - like the chest of any living breathing thing, its gentle shifts leading her to rub up against the ropes hanging down between her and the dock. She creaked softly in her berth as dozens scampered around her, and she knew nothing of men of war or governments of nations, nothing of militaries; she knew only the water beneath her keel, the waves lapping at her hull, the dock nudging up against her sides.

 

\---

 

At noon the next day - or roundabouts - the officer held true to his word and returned with others, and with a sheaf of papers as well.

The Captain of the  _ Isobel Worth _ was engaged with the men from the trading company; they were doubly excited, by both her speed and her newfound cargo of gold and jewels.

“Three weeks early! Despite the added weight and the strain!” One man called out over a moustache that seemed determined to eat up his words, but ill-equipped to do so at the same time.

“Fortuitous winds and desperation,” the Captain responded swiftly, his eyes darting out through the crowd on the dockside to see the bubble forming there and making its way through.

“Early still,” another man insisted, his vest and coat tailored to fit precisely and a large elaborate pipe held in hand, the bowl trailing thin wisps of white smoke until he sucked at the stem and, for a moment, the smoke stopped.

It came out in a cloud from his lips instead, as his eyes turned thin and speculative. “Wonder if there could be some business in that, though - in tandem with the assurers, perhaps. Some venture wherein we could save foundering or assaulted ships and make away with men and precious cargoes?”

“Speculations!” Another blurted, red-nosed and similarly cheeked, the Captain paying as little attention as  _ Isobel _ herself. “All speculations - foolishness, assurance, where is any guarantee in it? The returns - no, I’ll not underwrite any voyage to sit around in the waters and  _ hope _ that some vessel comes into trouble, I’ll be sending them on to pick up silks and return, thank you very much.”

There was a chorus of rabble, a vast nonsense of words which individually had meaning but when thrown together like so many ingredients into the stew-pot ceased to have any of their original intent and instead became only a part of the whole; laughs and shouts, queries and derisive remarks all blending together into a confused melange.

Still, the Captain’s eyes stared out at the docks, until he lost sight of the approaching military men.

“And would you send  _ our _ vessels out without assurances, ha!” The moustached man was directing his comments toward the one with a red nose, who spluttered protests in response whilst all around him the cluster of businessmen continued to bicker and banter until they sounded like chickens in the coop.

“Gentlemen!” One of the officers, a Naval man with so much gold adorning his uniform that he would surely have drowned had he entered the water. “I’ve been informed I’ve you to thank for this fortuitously-timed information.”

A series of remarks, either open or begrudging, directed the man not toward them as a group but rather toward the Captain himself - he saluted, though he was no military man, but a handshake would hardly be fitting.

“The Queen is entirely grateful for services rendered,” the Naval man stated, handing over a sheet of paper to the businessmen - they gathered around it and gawked as children at a newly carved wooden pony on display in a shop.

The  _ Partridge, _ having been lost at sea, was lamentable; however, it would seem that they had been outside of their lane entirely, encroaching on the established and protected territories of another company, and as such their cargoes were forfeit. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd originally roughly planned to have the Privateer attack happen in the Caribbean, where she was going to go after her successful return voyage, but I decided to combine the two for no reason in particular. Turns out, there was a reason, and that reason was the drought/famine conditions, sooo if I go back and edit this I'll be doing that instead, heh. My "planning" for this story consists of about four plot points, each of which consists of maybe five words? Maybe more like two in a few instances. Trying to take this one very much by the seat of the pants and it seems to be working fairly well so far.


	8. 12

Their cargoes, now made  _ Isobel’s _ \- one or two of the gathered cluster began to splutter or spurt protests upon reaching that section of the document, that the cargoes being forfeit were to be remanded to the Queen; half to her and half to the company whose business was being encroached upon.

The squawks did not lessen upon the further papers foisted upon them.

Firstly, the statement on the  _ Partridge _ and her former cargoes, unwelcome to be sure. Secondly, a statement of thanks and grace from the Queen, which the businessmen all lauded but only in tones which said it was borne of requirement rather than true feeling. Thirdly, a small sheaf, bearing official seals and crests.

The crew of the  _ Isobel Worth _ were given a special commendation from the Crown, a high honour for civilians as they’d ever hope to achieve; the same was extended to those businessmen who owned her and underwrote her voyages, for having provided a vessel and a crew and procedures capable and willing to undergo such an extension of aid.

A portion of the remanded cargoes of the former  _ Partridge  _ were to be distributed to them, as a display of thanks and a remuneration for costs undertaken or profits undercut by the venture, and a further stipend was specified as well - ongoing, a lump sum to be paid every month for the continued and dedicated services of the vessel  _ Isobel Worth. _

She was given a commendation, a pat on the back, a reward, and a letter of draft.

The businessmen stared openly at the papers, handing the last of them around amongst them and reading carefully through its phrases; she was to be the property of the Queen, ongoing, and they were to be paid a handsome sum every month for the next two years regardless of her performances with the Navy - regardless of what happened or how she carried on, they would be paid.

If she still floated at twenty-four months’ end, the contract would be renegotiated and they would either be provided a further sum for the loss of their vessel, a new contract for further service, or the ship herself, less any armaments or specific Navy property or installations.

The docks were never silent. The sounds of shouts and calls, from ship to dock or from high to low, the ever-present soft lap and splash of water, the clack and clatter of carts and horse hooves, the chatter of voices and yells of children - there was much noise to be heard.

Insomuch as it could ever be silent, though, it fell then.

A dozen businessmen and two-thirds that number from the military, and the Captain (former) as well, stood on deck in the utmost of silence possible in such a cacophonous locale.

One of them, the one with the thick moustache, blurted out a laugh. “Aha! Well, perhaps you’ll be getting your wish after all - there, see, we’re to be paid with no journey run at all. Silks or no, return or no,  _ floating _ or no, we’re paid. Gentlemen, the ultimate guarantee of return.”

It sounded forced, though. A strong voice but one that wavered as his massive moustache hid any possible tremble of a lip, because of course in times of war, nothing was guaranteed.

None of them wished to think it, but, of course, if there was no Crown to pay them - God save the Queen - they could not be paid. Floating or otherwise, positive performance or poor, they would be paid.

Presuming they survived the ensuing war.

The Navy man turned to the Captain, providing a few sheets of paper for him; the orders to sail the  _ Isobel Worth _ to a drydock for refit, and an offer of induction into the Queen’s Navy, with an immediate promotion.

He tore the paper in half and threw it overboard without a second look. “Gents of the board, if you’ve concluded your business, I suppose it’s time you left and went to the counting house. You soldiers - let’s hope you’ve at least the sense to pull a rope when I tell you. We’ve no other sailors to get her into drydock.”

It was a more somber procession that left her then, in comparison to the bulk of her crew the day beforehand - the underwriters and owners filing off her planks as the soldiers did their best to make ready, running where they were told by the Captain’s short shouts.

The Naval officer regarded him shrewdly throughout the procedures, approaching after they cast off from the dock and were on their way. “No desire to sail the seas under Her Majesty’s ensign?”

He continued only to watch as the Captain didn’t look over, ginger hair going grey at the temples but certainly with plenty of life left in him. “It’s a generous offer, given only because of your history and your name.”

Still, the Captain gave no response.

“I served alongside your father, he was a good man,” the officer began, but that provoked a response - a swift one that cut off his words like a sabre through a haulyard.

“Then you’ll know why I tore up your offer.”

He didn’t look over, his narrowed eyes fixed outward - scanning the ships and boats nearby, the docks, the water for any issues; watching the soldiers as they scurried and did the poorest job he’d seen from any group of weak-kneed landsmen, but they did well enough for her to make way.

She hardly cared about their lack of knowledge, anyway. If they hauled her flying jib when they should’ve drawn her second one instead, she had no concern over it; she felt the wind catch it and lift her prow and pull her out forward the same way any tree felt that same breeze, and she went. If they were sloppy, if they were wrong, it made no difference to her.

On her decks, the men rushed in panic under the Captain’s shouts, and the officer only stood and watched.

 

\---

 

The drydock, at first, bore little difference to any dock. Smaller perhaps, of more confined quarters - there were only twenty feet between each of her sides and the wooden walls on either side, and not even that much between her stern and the one behind it.

They swung shut the huge doors, thick in the water and pushing up wavelets as they were hauled through with thick ropes - then, they began to pump the water out.

She settled, lowering a foot or two as the water did, the wooden platforms on all sides raising up as she did. Thick blocks below her met her hull, and she settled onto those - settled and then creaked and groaned as the water continued to abate.

In a small shack to one side, a man sat with no pipe and no fire and no candles, but he did have a charcoal pencil and the designs from which she had been laid, and he looked between them and her as the water drained away, and he sketched.

Inch by inch, it fell, the waterline proceeding lower and lower down the planks of her hull. A chorus of groans rose up as planks rubbed on planks, beams were stretched, the block beneath her slipping an inch or two against her hull or against the ground beneath them.

The man had no pipe to chew upon, but he did have the pencil, and gnawed its end like a rodent might - or a child. As he looked down, a measuring stick in hand, and figured how many cannons she could take; as he scribbled numbers on a previously blank sheet to the side, he would pause to put the pencil’s end between his teeth and leave marks upon it.

When the water was gone, she knew it no longer; she knew instead the strain along her keel as it supported weight in a way it was not used to, the odd stretch of a hull that wasn’t floating, the slight shift of planks and boards - she knew these things as a tree knows a new branch, not in thought but in contact.

Twelve cannons of a larger size, or sixteen of a smaller one; to outfit her for this mission or for that, primarily; a gaff sketched in that was five feet too long at least, at first, before having the latter quarter of it removed by a thick chunk of gumsap that he kneaded between his fingers when he wasn’t using it to chase away undesired marks and lines.

Her original designs, of course, were in ink by this point.

Sketches and scribbles and calculations, a second charcoal pencil and a hundred hundred shavings of the two of them as they were slid against the sharp edge of a knife to restore their points, and when he was finished with it, he handed the sheets off without ceremony.

They descended upon her with tools, with measuring sticks, with saws and drills and paintbrushes, and sheets of paper which said what it was they were meant to do. Every sail and rope was pulled from her, taken somewhere away to be remade or reused elsewhere.

She would be given new ones, they said.

A thick coat of paint, black like the charcoal which had made her designs, slopped over every board of her hull after they’d been painstakingly scraped and washed clean - they carved off every clinging barnacle or clutching fragment of seaweed, they sloshed great buckets of fresh water from a stream over her and scrubbed and swabbed, and then they left her to dry. When she was, they painted her black, from stem to stern.

The name they’d given her -  _ Isobel Worth,  _ painted proudly just under her deck at the fore and across the width of her stern as well - was painted over black just as everything else.

She would be given a new one, they said.

Nobody asked her - not about the name and not about the sails, and not when they tore up the planks of the after section of her deck to give her a quarterdeck that could hold a pair of cannons, and not about any of the rest.

When they took out the hinge pins of her rudder and took it away, and replaced it with one that was larger, nobody asked her - and she sat just the same on the blocks but with just a little more weight toward her stern, just a little more strain.

They nailed in crossbeams to strengthen her up laterally, and they cut in holes in her hull for gunports; they tore her crew cabins and galley and cargo holds apart entirely until she was nothing more than keel and ribs and hull and mast, and they began to fill her with new spaces of a new design.

Cargo holds became magazines instead, for powder and for shot; ball, grape, canister, case - she was not loaded with them, not yet, but they said that that was what she would be filled with.

Crossbars were added to her single mast, to let her fly square sails - a large gaff, as well, taking what had been the mainsail of her fore-and-aft arrangement and splitting it into two sails, but letting her carry that much more canvas as a result.

They inspected her mast and its attachments, and they shored it up some, but it was all in good shape; they looked at every plank of hers and every beam, every rib, ensuring that all was in good order. They patched up the splinters in her stern where the grapeshot ball had lodged itself.

Fifteen cannons, in the end, she was to carry. Ten, belowdecks, five either side to poke out from their gunports - twelve pounders, not particularly large but then neither was she.

Neither was she, but none had ever complained about that; none had said that she was small or not large enough, only that she was swift and sure - they never spoke ill, only well.

Five twelve pounders on each side, and then on her upper decks a complement of smaller cannons, two each side of eight pounders meant primarily to fend off boarders when loaded with canister or case.

They set a long nine in her bow, where its barrel poked out over her long bowsprit like a curious sailor looking off forward, and a pair of swivel guns were affixed to each side near her bannisters as well.

It took them some fair time.

The sun and moon both rose and set, many times, continuing their endless dance - their endless battle, up over the skies and beyond and back and back again, two dozen times they rose and fell before they said they had finished, before they dusted off their hands and stood at the platforms alongside her in the drydock, and they looked her over, and they said they were done.

They said they were done, and they called her beautiful; they called her formidable, that she would chase down any prey and flee any assailant, that she would be swift and agile and strong like a rapier of the sea.

The reason behind her name, her new name, painted in gleaming white along her bow and across her stern:  _ Rapier. _

As a rock, she was, and now she had been taken, through no effort nor desire on her part, and fashioned into a weapon; her edges sharpened and her every inch polished to a bright shine, she was lethal as any sword.

Black from stem to stern but with bright, whitewashed accents - brilliant, bleached white sails, gaff, main, square and jib alike, shining in the sun. Deck clear of clutter, ropes coiled neatly, everything in order as it only ever was at the dock, as it only ever was when she was out of the water and not sailing.


	9. 13

Her outline was different, no longer matching with those charcoal swoops which had been made by a hand which also held that chewed-stem pipe; a quarterdeck had been added and outfitted, her aft deck raised, her sails reconfigured.

She carried twice as much canvas now as she had, and so so very much more iron and brass in the cannons - they poked their noses out of their gunports along her either side, the port covers lifted high and tied up.

Even her name, they had changed, but she hardly cared - could not have, some might say.

Slowly, the sluice gates to the drydock opened, and the water began to rush. It flooded from the seas beyond the thick doors, boring through the sluiceways with such speed and force that it foamed when it shot out the far end and into the drydock proper - thick jets of water, spraying across the stone and splashing against the blocks she rested upon.

Inch by inch, the water rose, until the surface of it lapped at her keel and she knew it once more; as it continued up her planks she knew it again as a rock knows the rains after drought, board by board by board up her hull, its fury abating as its volume swelled.

Soft groans and creaks, her beams and posts rubbing against each other with almost a sigh as she lifted free of the blocks, supported by the water’s buoyancy finally once more - every man on the sides of the dock cheered as she did, shifting slightly in the water, held by the thick ropes which ran from her to shore.

They went to her figurehead, with great ceremony - with pipers and drummers and buglers, with men in uniform standing in formation, saluting as a noble toasted her with a bottle of sherry shattered on her prow.

That figurehead, the maiden on her bow holding a shell and her pendant, had been the only part of her overall unchanged; they’d touched up the damages to her paint where they saw them, but had left her gown the same colour and made no alterations to her skin or other accents.

Glinting in the sun, the shard of glass from her first launching, remained; that one fragment of her initial christening nearly the only remnant of what she’d been.

They called her swift, they called her deadly; the  _ Rapier, _ to be the dread of her foes and the saviour of her allies, they called her beautiful and they called her ready for battle.

They called her she.

As the huge doors of the drydock were pulled out, the men all cheered and delighted; she was pulled out by rope at first and then the party aboard her laid on sail and she began to move under her own power - or at least, under that power which she borrowed from the wind.

Borrowed, or stole, perhaps, because neither she nor anyone else ever asked the wind; and perhaps that was why it would sometimes whip into a frenzy, furiously striving to destroy her or any other ship it could find - perhaps the wind was only vengeful for the power which had been stolen from it.

As much as any falling rock could be vengeful for its disturbance, hurtling toward the one who’d pried it loose.

 

\---

 

A new crew, a new Captain, to go with the new name and new outfitting; there was hardly anything of her that was the same, in fact.

With the exception of the fact that, when she came into the water, she was still so very swift.

They filled her magazines with powder and shot, her one hold with food and water and rum, and they filled her cabins with sailors; some said she carried too much for such a small ship, too many men, too much iron and brass.

They didn’t say so for long.

Down the river, she drifted lazily, floating by current and two jib sails alone with her prow digging through the water like a farmer’s plow through the fields. She was certain, they said, but they joked that she was more a cleaver than a rapier.

Only until she made the open seas, though.

When she did - when the white cliffs were behind her and they hoisted on more sail, her square sail billowing and pulling taught in the sun along with her gaff, they stopped their jokes. When her prow rose from the water like steel being unsheathed, shining in the sun from the sheen of water, they ceased their judgements.

When she began to fly again, they all said the same - the dissenting voices calling for a smaller complement or for a second mast all fell into silence, and then into unison, and they said she had been made for the water.

It didn’t matter if she was swift in the rivers, they laughed, she bore over and through waves like no ship they’d ever sailed on; it didn’t matter if she was sluggish near port, they called, she had no such qualms when the breezes pulled her canvas tight.

They’d given her four days to reach the detachment she was to fight with. She made it there in three, before the sun had even crested its height.

Amidst the others, she was small, tiny even; amongst the crowd of the Navy, its three-decked galleons carrying two or three masts, up against the ships carrying forty or fifty cannons to her paltry-seeming fifteen - in comparison, she was tiny. A fly amongst cattle.

Every farmer will tell you, though, of the chaos that a fly can cause in a herd.

She sailed on past the flagship, over eighty cannons strong; two alone of her largest forty-two pounders were almost as much as the  _ Rapier’s _ total complement combined. All in all she carried more weight in iron and brass than the  _ Rapier  _ did in everything together - cannon and wood and men and canvas as well.

Three decks at the aft and fore, two in the middle, dozens of ports on either side with three masts holding a pair of square sails each - she was a formidable ship, to be sure, and her name was borne proudly on her bow:  _ Bulwark. _

She was to be the firmament upon which the enemy would break, and she led the battle - the Admiral high on her forecastle looking out upon them from beneath his high-plumed hat.

Sun caught in the snow-white plume of his hat just the same as it gleamed off of the bleached sails behind him flying from the  _ Bulwark’s _ three masts; just as she, he stood proud with his chin upheld, and he swayed gently on the water and in the wind but gave no indications of anything other than strength.

He spared a glance for the newcomer below him as the  _ Rapier’s _ sails interrupted his line of sight for a moment, and he watched the way she slid through the water with so little effort.

For another two days they would wait there, anchored and awaiting the arrival of the last few ships, before finally they weighed their anchors and made their way toward seas both foreign and hostile.

 

\---

 

With a fleet, she made no headway; she couldn’t, or else leave them behind, and she surely would if it arose. The  _ Bulwark _ was a fine ship, tall and strong, but she moved through the water with the grace of the drydock’s doors.

If that.

With much larger ships off either shoulder, the  _ Rapier _ and her crew flew as little canvas as possible, most of her sails furled as if some harsh storm surrounded her rather than a fleet of her allies.

A storm they were, though - a vast brewing tumult of wood and canvas, of flesh and iron and gunpowder, and they were as formidable a sight on the horizon as any wall of dark clouds would be. White sails above the water rather than black cloud scudding the sky, but no more welcome a sight.

The fleet sailed in loose formation, smaller ships shifting as needed to keep from overrunning larger ones - they sailed to and fro at times when the lighter breezes blew them on but made little difference to their more vast sistren who sat lower in the water yet still decks higher above.

The  _ Bulwark  _ was at the core rather than the fore, flying her ensigns high; all of them did, every single ship, and calls or chants were shouted from ship to ship at times as they sailed through sunset and rise, through days and nights.

Whether they were sailing to blockade, to defend, to attack, none of them could have said - not the  _ Rapier _ and not her crew, nor Captain; they had been ordered, and so they did, and in that way they were one, ship and crew unified.

Her wheel was turned and it pulled her chains, and she swung her rudder round to turn; they saw a flag signal hoist on the  _ Bulwark _ and they moved, hauling ropes and furling sails. One thing led to another, links in a chain that was devoid of thought and even defied it.

A chain they were, and a storm as well, each ship linked to the next through shouts and signals and flags, each one a white cloud of sails and guns and wood low upon the water feeding into the strength of the next, and the next, and the next.

The sea itself bore the scars of their passage, the wakes of the fleet individually adding up to a collective raking that streaked across the ocean’s surface for a great length behind them all. 

Even that, though, faded in time, and leagues behind the fleet the sea was its normal self again with no indication of their passage. The oceans bore no lines carved by men, no borders or divisions where one nation’s waters began and those of another came to end.

Yet, still, the men said they knew where to find them - those lines which they held of such great importance.

When one such line invented by men and held only on their charts, and never marked on the sea itself, was crossed, the call was sent out, a pennant let to fly on the flagship  _ Bulwark’s _ foremast.

The smaller ships, the  _ Rapier _ included, went out ahead of the rest of the fleet, to scout and first see the enemy and then to report back.

Their wakes stretched out, long and thin furrows cut into the waves; finally, she was let to run as she so clearly wished, and the crew aboard her gave up a short and orderly hurrah when her sails pulled taught and she began to race.

She outpaced every other ship in the foreguard; so much so that her Captain even considered giving the call to cut loose, to let off sail and let slack their ropes and thus their pace, and let the remainder of the scouts catch up.

He considered it.

Considered, and discarded, and said instead to make for the fullest speed possible; he shifted the wheel, bringing her head around a few degrees to make better use of the prevailing winds.

She skipped over waves and sliced clean through them, water slapping at her hull as she seemed to skim overtop it like a child’s rock thrown with an expert hand. Between tasks and whenever they had the opportunity, the men aboard her let up gay cries and made known their joy.

They’d thought her too small, once - they’d thought her too heavily loaded, but now there was not a doubt or a dissent amongst them and every single one was of a sole mind on the matter.

Up her mast, a lookout held his spyglass to his eye and kept it trained on the horizon in front of them; he clutched at the mast which shivered with the strength of the gales it caught and the shaking of her hull as it cut through water, and watched as well he could.

He was, of course, the first to see sails.

A call down to the Captain, and an order then sent out to the rest of the men - they would press on, forward, get a better view of the enemy fleet before returning, but first they would send up the signal.

One man went to the swivel gun at her rear and loaded it, swinging it around to point up in the air - the target was of no importance, but when the small gun was set off it sent a great plume of smoke billowing into the air.

This was seen by men on the other scout ships, and relayed back in turn; so on and so on until it came even to the eye of the Admiral aboard the  _ Bulwark _ , and the fleet began to make ready for engagement.

The  _ Rapier _ , though, still had her orders. Her crew made sure every cannon was loaded and readied, a chorus of thumps as they were pulled tight out against her boards.


	10. 14

Every item was secured, and every face - every man’s face aboard her was set, somewhere between grim and a grimace but with more than a hint of grin as well.

They were, after all, not only sailors but soldiers.

Onward to glory was the thought; “For Queen and Country!”, the call, and in the fore of the boat a man stood with a smoldering linstock and a squinted eye. He crouched in the  _ Rapier’s _ bow, next to the long nine they’d nestled there, and he waited as the waves crashed against her prow - every one a nudge, a bump, a little rise and fall, but they were not so unpredictable when there was time to gauge them.

Gauge them, he did, with his tongue tip poking out between his teeth and lips; a childhood interest in music led to a fine determination of rhythm, and he timed himself well.

The linstock curled wisps of smoke as he pressed it against the breech of the long cannon, its barrel lined up along the  _ Rapier’s _ bowsprit and pointed at a cluster of enemy sails; the ships began to move, canvas being dropped or hauled on as the sailors on the enemy ships must have spotted them.

A few moments too late to act first, though.

The soldier’s timing was impeccable, and as a wave smacked against the  _ Rapier’s _ prow and thrust her bow up by a degree or two, the cannon loosed, shunting itself backward along the deck as the men cheered.

The first shot - the first from that cannon, the first of the battle and some would even come to say the first of the war, but a painted-over patch of formerly splintered wood on the former  _ Isobel Worth’s _ stern might beg to differ on that last point at least.

Regardless, in many ways, this shot was first.

It sailed long and low, a high charge and a long barrel ensuring a fast and flat flight, a small-ish ball perhaps but still plenty capable as it proved when it smashed through a bannister and then a yard, leaving a sail flapping limply in its wake and shards of wood as shrapnel scattering across decks and crew - it carried on to punch a hole through a sail, then another of another ship, snap two lines on the next one, and finally slam against the gunwale of one toward the far end of the formation.

Without the power to punch through the reinforced wood, the single ball fell unceremoniously into the water below and sent up an unimpressive splash, but it had done its job well and clear and had as much right to be proud of itself as any soldier doing their duty and carrying out their orders in war.

Shouts and cries went up from the ships, lines pulled taught and sails hoisted where they hadn’t yet been; the fleet, it seemed, had been anchored awaiting something, either orders or arrivals or both, and the ships were not all quite ready immediately.

Unfortunate, for them. Fortuitous for the  _ Rapier _ and her crew.

“For Queen and Country,” the cry came again, cheered from every member of the crew, “God save the Queen!”

They could see one of the square sails of one of the ships, one of the large three-masted ones, hanging down limply and they knew they had struck - emboldened, they pressed on, and the  _ Rapier _ complied without complaint.

“Hard starboard, men - let known below to ready all cannons, let’s give them all we have as we come about!” The Captain’s command - a Captain in rank as well as position - rang out clearly above the faintly-echoing toll of the long nine, and all the men on deck hurried to adjust the sails as he spun the wheel.

The  _ Rapier _ groaned and creaked, wood pressing on wood as her keel carved a curve through the water; her mast shifted off to the side, twisting to match her progress through the turn, and as puffs of smoke shot from enemy vessels it became very provident that she’d begun to turn.

Cannonballs struck the water all around her, a dozen or two at least, but not a one hit solid - one passed through her square sail, a few feet off to one side, roundabouts where her mast had been a few scant seconds before but that was the closest to true damage that they came.

From that volley, at least.

She was one small ship, being fired at in surprise by a flotilla - it was easy to miss her, but she conversely could hardly have let off any shot toward the dozens of enemy ships without succeeding in hitting  _ something _ at least.

Presuming that the shots did not fall short, of course - which is precisely what they would have done, if let loose in the middle of a turn as sharp as she held; listing over to the outside, the cannons would only have assaulted the sea, and it had committed no great atrocity against them for which the sailors wished vengeance.

Her now-extended rudder slewed through the water, throwing off harsh vortices and eddies as it twisted around and brought her on a straight heading again, just long enough for her to straighten up - just long enough for her to catch her breath, and stand upright with her mast pointed directly skyward again.

All of her cannons along her larboard side fired, the five twelve pounders below decks and the pair of eight pounders above as well, and her crossbeams shuddered with their percussion but the braces that had been added in drydock did their job well and held her firm and fast. The Captain spun the wheel and her chains ran through their blocks, the rudder swinging, and she continued to carve through the turn.

A score of hits, on sail and sailor and sailing ship alike; canvas hanging limp was the only damage evident to the crew onboard the  _ Rapier _ , but they knew there would be more to go with it.

“To the  _ Bulwark, _ men,” the Captain urged, “but keep an eye on our hindquarters, I’ll not be caught out blind.”

Of course, the enemy fleet gave chase. How could they not? They could no more deny the affront of having been assaulted than the fleet of the  _ Bulwark _ and  _ Rapier _ could have - neither could permit any thing to go unanswered, and so it seemed they would be locked in perpetual conflict, a constant cycle of reciprocation and reciprocation and reciprocation.

Not that the  _ Rapier _ gave such a thing any mind, of course.

They called her a fine vengeance - they called her the tip of the spear and they laughed and patted her on the gunwales and the bannisters as she sped away from the enemy fleet; her prow skipped across waves as her rudder straightened and her sails caught the wind, and her wake was peppered with cannon fire but none of the shots struck true.

“Touché,” shouted one man who thought himself clever, and several laughed who agreed - the  _ Rapier _ had scored her first point, but the duel was only beginning.

 

\---

 

She was pursued back toward the bulk of the fleet, given chase by smaller vessels in front with the larger ones following - once they turned to follow, there were far fewer cannons pointed her way. Still a few, bow chasers like her own long nine, but they were smaller and slower to fire and substantially, thankfully, fewer in number.

None could catch her, anyway.

The fleet started at a disadvantage, at a standstill where she had momentum, and they could gain no hold on her; she was faster than them, every one, and in fact once the cannon splashes had trailed far away off their stern - a sure sign they were out of range of the enemy guns - the Captain ordered her to slow somewhat.

He had a plan, and for it, they needed to be followed.

Her square sail was interfered with briefly, in such a way that it hung to look as if it had been struck - a plausible reason for their lessened speed, and something to hopefully spur the enemies on.

It worked.

They gave chase with increased fervor, firing off cannons again which had no hope of reaching her, but they fired still, as the  _ Rapier _ raced back across the sea to her own fleet.

First, she reached the other scouts.

As they raced past her, those which had bow guns letting loose with them, the Captain swung her rudder round and had them tighten the square sail up again, and he flew back into the fray.

Cannons sounded left and right, friend and foe alike - splinters of wood flew as thick as the smoke, as thick as any rain that had ever fallen, and shouts were indistinguishable amidst the maelstrom.

That was before the large ships even became involved.

These small ones, scout vessels and chase ships, had a dozen or two cannons in smaller sizes - but the Captain’s head snapped over to look back past his shoulder as a thunderous boom heralded the arrival of the  _ Bulwark _ with her more than eighty cannons, turned sideways to the battle to loose them all in a cacophonous avalanche of smoke and lead.

Where the scouts’ hits had been measured in showers of splinters, in a few cries and perhaps a toppling sail or two, the  _ Bulwark’ _ s broadside was a rush of destruction, a whirlwind compared to a breeze; one of the enemy scouts shuddered, twisted, and snapped in twain where a thirty six pound ball had shattered her keel and she began to plunge promptly into the water.

Entire masts fell, two more ships rendered useless and sinking as they listed heavily and took in water through gaping shattered holes like the mouths of beasts which would only be sated by lives lost, their teeth the wooden shards that encircled them and their prey the sailors who had the misfortune of being upon those ships.

Sadly, the  _ Bulwark _ was a small ship in comparison to the largest of their enemy.

Slower than any of the rest, but for good reason - a deck taller than the  _ Bulwark _ and clearly an older vessel that had been refitted, but to good use as she unveiled and then unleashed her torrent of cannonfire.

The  _ Rapier’s _ beams shook as the broadside came, the thumps of so many dozens of cannons combining into one colossal sound which struck her like any storm swell of a wave; one of her sister scouts exploded outright, a powder magazine struck, and the flames caught another of their alight.

The scouts began to scatter and flee, making for their larger cousins and sisters in their respective fleets - there was no orderly line of battle, no phalanx or shield wall, at least not yet, but every man and every ship hurried to make it so and to let the stronger vessels to the fore.

Ball and grapeshot, canister and case all flew wildly, and it was impossible to tell whose was whose. A case shot exploded over the  _ Rapier’s _ deck, slitting a hundreds small slashes in her gaff sail and lacerating the faces of a half-dozen sailors who painted her decks red for the second time in her life.

First under that name, however, but still far from last.

She had begun the battle unscathed and unharmed, but did not finish it so; she passed near an enemy galleon who let off several guns, and one took the outer third of the  _ Rapier’s _ square yard with it. She retaliated with her all, or nearly, but no shot even punctured clear through the galleon’s thick hull - they cracked, they splintered, but it was as if the larger vessel had not even noticed her passing.

As they slid swiftly past to its stern, however, one of the men in charge of firing one of the twelve-pounders only succeeded then in getting his cannon loaded. The powder-boy had dropped the charge at first, and the delay meant they couldn’t join in with the main assault; rushing, he pressed the linstock to the breech and hoped that he was not too late for something.

Something, it was most certainly not too late for. Something, he achieved.

The  _ Rapier _ barked once more, a small and almost sad-sounding pop amongst the din of battle from a lone twelve pound gun, but with devastating effect; the shot struck one of the galleon’s rudder hinges, shattering pintle and gudgeon both, before wedging itself firmly in the gap.

The  _ Rapier _ carried on along her way, unaware of the damage she’d caused - and, at first, her crew just the same. A few moments later, though, it became clear that something was wrong and one man pointed and shouted out.

Unable to steer, rudder damaged and wedged in place, the enemy galleon had no option save for to sail straight, and straight she sailed. Straight into one of her sisters, prow ramming her and riding up onto her amidships.

Crew from both ships shouted and fled, some throwing themselves down into the water as the ship underneath began to list toward the galleon, moreso as water gushed through its cracked hull.

Whether they would sink, the crew didn’t know, but it was a clearly solid hit and had taken the two vessels largely out of the fight.

With a joyous round of cries, the Captain spun the wheel around. The  _ Rapier’s _ prow dipped into the water slightly as she carved around the turn and headed back into the fray.


	11. 15

Order dissolved as the two fleets ran through each other, unable to unleash the most of their onslaught until their sides stared upon each other with dozens of tiny gunport eyes each one bearing a cannon instead of a pupil; the large ships drove through the battle’s centre like the great beasts of any land battle, like Hannibal’s elephants flailing their tusks and stomping their massive legs - like rampaging bulls, mindless of what surrounded them, coursing through the streets like a river of flesh and horns.

The smaller ones were like the flies which might so disturb said bull or elephant: they could hardly do much damage, but they proved quite effective at annoyance as they flitted to and fro, dodging all but the luckiest of hits.

Least lucky of all were the mid-sized vessels. The more moderate galleons, the ones large enough to present a target but too small to have a hull as thick as the  _ Bulwark, _ the ones large enough to fire a salvo which drew sharp attention but too small to have such a volley decisively win the engagement - they were the least fortunate, overall. When they fell within range and sight of enemy cannons, their moments tended to be numbered.

By contrast, the  _ Rapier _ moved faster than most other vessels, certainly moreso than any of the larger ones - they could not hope to come around and train cannons on her, and so relied on little more than luck to score a hit.

Although, such a hit would be entirely devastating.

The  _ Rapier _ flashed through the battle quite like her namesake, plunging foreward and flicking off; her timbers shook with shots whenever anything was within line of any cannon, the men abandoning any pretense of firing as a volley and simply loosing when they could.

A ball struck her at a severe angle, cracking the port side of her hull and nudging her over; the long nine in her bow was fired in return to unknown effect as her rudder swung over and carved her away.

Canvas was easily damaged and large as well, fragments of case or canisters slicing through along with whole balls or grapes and more than one large splinter of wood from nearby ships.

Another scout swept alongside her in the fray, unseen as it approached and then nudged up firmly alongside her. Her hull planks groaned in complaint as she listed over, the men on her deck pulling out blades or firing the swivel guns to deter boarders who tried to leap across the gap - a re-enactment of the  _ Partridge’s _ final moments, perhaps, but with very different players on stage and a different ending as well.

The Captain gritted his teeth, calling for the nearest swivel-gunner’s aid - together, they hauled over the wheel as quickly and firmly as they were able.

The drum, the ropes, the pulleys, the chains, the rudder; all links which acted together when the wheel was spun, all pieces which contributed and did their part in much the same way that any man who’d wielded a hammer near her could be called a creator.

So, in this way, she could well be called a killer.

Her rudder threw up a great host of angry eddies from an already violently churned sea, and her prow jerked over solidly; she struck up against the other ship and knocked it back, listing away as her hull rubbed on its and her planks and beams creaked with strain - the two were locked for a few moments like this, the picture of men in an ale house wrestling arms for a round of beer, but the Captain had noticed something nobody else had.

They were hardly alone on the field of battle - or sea of battle, such as it was - and had to make constant manoeuvres in order to avoid any collision. The Captain had quickly become accustomed to watching for such safe pathways, which meant he was equally adept at finding  _ dangerous _ ones.

Anoth shiper, a very large one which would likely never have noticed their passing, bore down upon them, and the Captain twisted the wheel over to bring the  _ Rapier _ as close as he dared.

With a sudden crunch, the other scouting vessel struck the prow of the larger ship - momentum carried her forward and over the small and sundered vessel, who was in a moment swallowed up by waves and overrun by keel.

Listed over sharply as she was, the  _ Rapier _ avoided most of the damage which might’ve been incurred, bouncing roughly over as the larger ship continued on its opposite path and the bulge of its hull knocked her around like a child’s toy boat in a storm - beams creaked and cracked, and she tipped over far enough that water lapped in through the gunports on that side, but she emerged afloat as the large ship’s stern passed her by.

More than could be said for the enemy scout, certainly. Not a scrap of her could even be seen, consigned to an eternity below the waves.

Another cheer, every one of the men letting out a shout to let known their delight for having caused the sinking of a vessel - an enemy vessel, they would have said, but of course the ship herself had never meant them any ill.

Nor did the  _ Rapier _ feel any relief, or any pride in the victory she’d won; she felt only the wounds that had been inflicted and continued to do so, the nudges and strikes that were scored against her as water ran thick in her bilge and mixed with blood.

 

\---

 

Hours later, they reconvened.

Sails tattered like the wings of a moth fallen prey to a careless child, hull cracked like the skin of a brick improperly baked, deck coated with blood like any soldier’s blade after a battle, the  _ Rapier _ sailed along with her fellows as they made a return voyage home.

Several captured ships went with them, trophies who would surely be renamed and refitted and sent out to sea again flying a different flag, a grim echo of the fate she’d nearly befallen herself, but she spared no concern for it.

Her sides were not quite level as she went along, the result of things having shifted belowdecks, but she carried her prow proudly high of the water - as her Captain carried his chin.

Men had been lost, damages sustained, but they’d emerged victorious.

There was a flurry awaiting them at the docks, as there always seemed to be; men waiting to leap into her rigging and scour her hull and do all of the things which were needed, but for the first time, she was not immediately attended to.

Several of those other vessels worse-off than she was, were brought in first - vessels whose sails hung down like mourner’s veils, ships who heeled so heavily to the side that capstans were needed to right them before they could be slowly brought in to the drydocks.

The  _ Rapier _ , conversely, anchored out away from the docks and awaited a small shuttle boat which came and nudged up against her side a few dozen times as the sun slowly set, and every time it did it carried away with it a few men and a few barrels and a few other things; every time it bumped into her boards, she would find herself an increment higher in the water after it left.

In time, there was nobody left aboard to hear the gentle creak and groan as she swayed, sails furled, in the wind and the swell. A flurry of activity on all the docks was constant, and remained so as the larger ships came in for docking - those who would take days to unload by shuttle, but they were already finished with her by then.

For a while, she was granted some rest, to float with no strain or stress, but not for long.

Repairs were done, in the manner of such things; her sails taken down and patched, her lines run and fixed, her hull planking inspected, boards pulled free and replaced with new ones where required with pitch-soaked rope hammered tight in the gaps, a new coat of paint over her all.

When it was finished, she was quite nearly as she had been on her first day of being called  _ Rapier -  _ a few pounds heavier, for what little that mattered, because of the slightly thicker planks that had been used in a few places. A few patches of paint in a barely lighter shade of black, but one would need to be standing astride her in order to see that and one so rarely ever was.

Again, despite the cautious inspection, the shard of glass in the maiden figurehead’s cheek was left untouched. It had been painted over in the touching up, unseen, and was no held in place not only by the friction which had glued it for some time, but also by a layer of lacquer overtop, and it seemed nothing would disturb it.

If it had managed to survive the chaos of the battle, surely it would take some great feat to dislodge.

Men came aboard her again, a similar crew - the same Captain, with many of the same men, but also a host of new ones to replace those who had fallen to death or injury during the battle.

He eyed them as they came aboard over the plank, bringing with them cargoes of food and water and rum, and he could not avoid the knowledge that they were, all of them, fresher faces; not just to him, but overall, men who had seen fewer years in general and almost certainly fewer at sea.

Fewer, if any.

When they shipped out again, casting off and heading for the open ocean, he took them around a slightly longer route - giving the newcomers time to both acclimatize themselves to the ship, and also giving her time to stretch her sails and ensure that everything was in good shape.

It was, too.

Fine engineers and workmen in the Navy, they said - fine carpenters, and every rigger worth his salt, and sailmakers who knew their craft better than any other, they said, but they also said her name. A fine vessel she was, the  _ Rapier -  _ vengeful, they said, chuckling and telling the newer younger sailors about the battle. Quick and sure, she was, and deadly; they spoke of the first shot and the ensuing dance to avoid retaliation, they spoke of much.

They patted her on the bannisters and thumped a fist against her mast when they walked past it, and she knew these gestures as she knew their footsteps which echoed through the spaces within her, as she knew the water against her hull and the wind in her sails; she knew them with every moment through visceral contact, though she heard not their praise and saw not their hope.

Even despite their detour, they made the fleet a half-day earlier than required, and the Captain gladly went aboard the flagship for his orders.

 

\---

 

There was a storm, on the way to the next battle - they knew that this one was to be a battle, every man in every crew knew ahead of time, and every one was prepared. They were less prepared for the storm, which they of course did not know about, not much beforehand.

They knew as the lookouts called of cloud, they knew as winds picked up and seas roughened and they took the measures they knew to take. Aboard the  _ Rapier, _ her newer crew did perhaps react a little more slowly, a little less surely, than more experienced sailors might’ve - but she was sure and she was swift, enough to compensate.

Sails furled save for her storm jib, that small patch of canvas stretching out from mast to her bowsprit; hatches battened down and gunports held down as securely as could be to prevent them taking in water, the bilge manned with extra men to deal with any water which did manage to seep in - she was, as they were, as prepared as could be.

No hail, but harsh winds and violent seas as Mother Nature seemed once more determined to inter a vessel within her everlasting and cold embrace in the sea; the fleet spread out to prevent any ship from overrunning another, and they did their best to weather the storm.

In the morning, several of them listed to one side or another. One, so sharply so that two others went to its side with ropes cast over in an attempt to save it - they tried valiantly, all three crews doing all they could, but in the end it was not enough and a call was made to abandon ship and cast off lines and she fell over until her keel saw the sky for the first and only time before sinking slowly below the waves.

Three other ships hadn’t even made it that long.

Disappeared during the night, but with grim reminders left floating; items from the deck bobbing in the waves and bumping against hulls, and bodies as well.

Cries for aid were difficult to hear amidst a gale.

The next night brought the same, two more ships lost and no calm in the morning, the storm’s fury refusing to abate; the  _ Rapier _ remained staunch and steadfast throughout, but without sail flying she did slog rather than sprint - as did they all.

Slow progress and losses took a swift toll on morale, the men muttering darkly to themselves or each other, but on the fourth day there was sun and hearts began to raise again.

With the stars in sight again, positions could be checked, and the news was not good. The fleet had drifted and was not where they were meant to be, but corrections were issued and ordered and every ship made to carry them out.

Sails broad in the moonlight, the fleet sailed through the calm night, and into battle.

There was no warning when the first flashes were seen, shouts immediately going out, but not in time to do anything about it. Within seconds the thump of cannons was upon them, and then the balls as well, sailing through canvas and timber and flesh alike.

The enemy fleet, sitting at anchor, had no sail flown - nothing to easily reflect the moonlight and come to the lookout’s eye, but the  _ Rapier _ and her sistren were flying full canvas and stood out brightly below the moon.

They’d been seen on their approach, and this time, they were not the first to fire.

The night’s darkness made no lessening of the battle’s chaos. In fact, quite the inverse; the fray was only so much more frantic for the fact that everything was that much more difficult to see, that vessels would spring upon them from that much closer and give them that much less time to react.

A figurehead loomed out of the gloom, astern of the  _ Rapier, _ and a man called out to draw the Captain’s eye - his head snapped over and he shouted out immediately, spinning the wheel and telling them to slack the sails such to sharpen her turn, and as a result they were not run down but only shunted firmly off.

Every plank and beam creaked as they rubbed against each other, from the tip of her mast down to her keel; every part and piece of her shifting just for an instant with the force of the blow, itself more than enough to splinter planks in her stern, but her rudder caught the water and loose sails pulled her over as well and she went, narrowly avoiding the fate she’d inflicted on another the battle before.

She was luckier than many, that night.

Morning found more than a dozen vessels broken, not from cannon but from contact, and debris and bodies floated thickly in the water, only parting in the wakes of those ships who still floated.

They were like scythes, cutting swaths in the wheat - the aftermath of the battle like a farmer’s field it was so thick and uniform on the water, but they left it behind and sailed away back home. 

Those of them who survived did, at least, turned and headed home, and they were careful to give a wide berth to the tips of three masts which poked up from the water in a grim reminder of the night’s largest casualty.

Largest, but perhaps not greatest.


	12. 16

Seventeen sailors dead of their crew, their blood swabbed free of the decks and their bodies rolled in sailcloth, weighted down with cannonballs, and tossed into the waters astern as the rest of the men saluted.

Seventeen sailors dead, and a further two dozen injured, ranging from lacerations to abrasions and broken bones, either from the combat or simply from being tossed around by the storm.

Seventeen sailors dead, and on their return to port, the Captain was given a commendation.

Valorous conduct in battle, they said - not for this fight but for the last, where the  _ Rapier _ with him at the helm had led the charge and fired the first shot, and the Captain received a ribbon pinned onto his uniform aboard the afterdeck of the  _ Rapier, _ and he did it with a smile.

With a smile, and a hidden sorrow, as he knew that the man who had been in charge of the gun - the sailor who had fired the first shot from the long nine - had died in the battle more recent.

Seventeen dead, in that fight, and he was given a ribbon.

A metal star was taken, on a large thick tack like a nail, and driven into the bow of the  _ Rapier _ alongside her name - an immediate and clear indicator of her proud service which they drove into her with a mallet, and then smiled when they looked at it.

A star for the broken boards and cracked crossbeams, the slit sails and warped wood - a star to repay the damages and injuries she’d sustained in valorous combat.

A star for her to repay the wounds of battle, and a ribbon for her Captain for the same.

A ribbon, and orders.

They shipped out again two nights later, seventeen new faces filling her bunks and looking back to the docks overtop her bannisters, waving to those on the land as they sailed off.

For Queen and Country.

 

\---

 

They met up with no massive fleet, but rather a smaller group, a scant and select few ships; three ketches armed with very little in the way of standard cannons, but each bearing a huge thick bombard forward of the masts, along with the  _ Rapier _ and a half-dozen similar ships for escort.

Swift and fairly lightly armed, all of them, but none so swift as the  _ Rapier _ \- with no Admiral’s eye upon them, the small division of ships engaged in more banter amongst themselves.

Races were undertaken, as they sailed out for their deployment, with the senior Captain - aboard a vessel called the  _ Emerald _ \- waving a flag to mark the setting off of the race. The ships in competition would run until that Captain’s sand glass ran through, and then he would wave the flag again and the ship in front was the winner.

The  _ Rapier, _ in any such competition she was part of, won.

Upwind, crosswind, downwind - gaff, lateen, lug or square, she beat them all and handily, and all of the men of all of the crews came to look at her in admiration.

She had been made for the water, they said; she would be the blade flashing fastest in the fight to come. She had been named perfectly, they said.

At nights, shanties drifted between the decks as the ships all carried on, the light from their storm lanterns illuminating the decks enough for sailors to keep them making way. The lookouts kept their eyes to spyglasses, but there was little chance they would be spotted so soon.

A straight line was, of course, the fastest route between any two places - but sometimes one’s desire for something else outweighs one’s desire for swiftness or efficiency. Such was the case with the Admiral who had laid the plans and given the orders: the ships were not to sail straight to their target, but rather out and into open water, Northward, before turning back down and coming at the enemy from hopefully unexpected quarters.

Hopefully.

He didn’t say that part when relaying the orders, of course. He kept the  _ hopefully _ to himself, and only told them where to go and when, and that afterward they were to escort the bomb ketches North far enough that they were seen to be safe, and then move to join with the main fleet Westward.

Hopefully.

That had all been in a room filled with charts and small wooden ships, and long sticks with edges to push the models around - a dozen men standing around a vast table with a map of the area moving ships around like children playing some huge boardgame, and not a one of them was onboard any of the ships in question.

Not one of them was the Captain aboard the  _ Emerald, _ not a one of them had volunteered to fill in one of the seventeen empty spaces aboard the  _ Rapier _ after her latest victory; not a one of them had set out to sea to see their plan through, not with these ships. The Admiral would be waiting aboard the  _ Bulwark _ on the main fleet, and the others remained in that planning room with their model ships and their shifting-sticks, and they pored over their charts like the counting-men of the trading company had worried over theirs.

Out on the sea, the sailors of the  _ Rapier _ and the  _ Emerald _ \- and the others as well - didn’t know of the charts, the divisions of squadrons of flotillas of fleets, the combination of guessing game and luck of the draw that dictated their movements; out on the sea, the sailors didn’t know the  _ hopefully. _

Out on the sea, they knew only the wind at their backs and the setting and rising sun, the adequate food and the unimpressive bunks, the annoyances and joys of life aboard, the shanties and the tots and the games of cards in the eve.

There were no dotted lines in the real world, like those on the charts and maps - yet, the Captains still knew, when they took their readings from their astrolabes, that they were approaching their positions. They knew, despite the lack of any indication in the sea, that they’d crossed into hostile waters.

The waters themselves were only as hostile as ever; placid at that moment but with the capacity to change at any given moment and wreak havoc upon individual ships or even whole fleets, but the men decided that there was a greater risk, and the shanties dropped away in the nights, and they kept themselves quieter.

It might deter the enemies, but it made no difference to the waters or the winds. Nothing would.

It was as the sun started to raise, painting the horizon pink with its glow, that one of the lookouts spotted lights in the distance - land, and, he shortly confirmed, the land they were looking for; the town and the docks they’d been sent for.

The scouting vessels split into two groups, three of them staying near the three bomb ketches and the other four - including the  _ Rapier, _ the only one who bore a star alongside her name - sailed forward toward the coast.

As the sun crested the horizon outright, at the backs of every sailor aboard those ships, the three ketches let their bombards sound - heralding in the new day with smoke and iron; the massive percussions of the mortars were enough to shake every thicker than normal timber of the ketches, enough to send them lurching back in the water slightly but only enough to draw tight on their anchor lines.

Above the  _ Rapier _ and her crew, the projectiles soared: high and long, they flew like birds making for the coast as if some storm was setting in.

It very nearly was, too.

The effects were unseen but surely substantial, the  _ Rapier _ and the other three scouts keeping near each other rather than rushing as swiftly as possible, and they sailed onward with tension rising in every man.

Every man, but not the ropes, where the tension held almost entirely constant; raising or lessening with the wind’s breeze but never holding that way for long, never changing overly in the long run, a stark contrast to the jaws of the sailors which gradually clenched tighter and tighter.

Another series of thumps from behind them was distant enough to barely send a tremor through the  _ Rapier’s _ beams and boards, but the call was soon sent that sails were seen approaching them.

Ropes ran tighter all at once, her sails pulling taught in response to the oncomers; she shook as the long nine in her bow was set off, like a dog shaking itself free of water before beginning to run, and then, run she did.

She shivered along the waves with the wind at her stern, bearing down upon and barreling toward the ships which had come out from land to meet her, themselves spurred on by a sudden and unexpected morning bombardment of their docks and dockyards.

A spatter of grapeshot flew through her square sail but didn’t slow her by a degree, and before she passed the other ships the Captain hauled her rudder over and called for change to the sails.

She dove to the side, her prow digging deep in the water and dragging, causing her to heel sharply to the side as she twisted and groaned for the strain of it, but it brought her side around to an approaching vessel in moments and every cannon on that side was unleashed.

The men let up a cheer as the enemy’s sails fell to the water, their mast shattered by the  _ Rapier’s _ thrust, and they pulled the sails tight again to make off on their way.

For a few moments, the ships from shore and those who’d been assigned to the ketches danced around each other, firing cannons and trying to get in close enough to board, but it didn’t take long for the defending vessels to realize that the bombardment of their home was not coming from here, and they struck further out to sea.

The ketches had let off another half dozen or so volleys from their huge mortars, but the  _ Rapier _ and the others had only one interest and order: to defend them to the last, and they came around to give chase to the ships that began to abandon the fight and head out deeper into the water.

Again, the  _ Rapier’s _ bow gun shook with a shout, sending a load of grapeshot this time and wreaking some havoc on the rigging of one of the ships but not stopping it - the  _ Emerald _ followed suit, slightly larger and designed more for chasing, she carried a pair of twelve pounders in her bow and let them both off.

One pursued defender was struck with a huge hole in the stern, just above the waterline, and it started to slowly take on water in splashes and spurts. At first it made no difference, but then the ship slewed suddenly, turning back toward land - an effort to save itself, but in vain, as it hung lower and lower in the water and only encouraged more water through the hole and into its holds.

The  _ Rapier _ dashed past it as its gunwales dipped below the surface, ignoring the shouting sailors who took to the water, the crew setting their sights solely on the other defenders who still made for the ketches.

Acting as a back line of defense, the three scouts who had stayed there were prompt to open up their cannons and make their stand, and between that and the returning four from the fore, the defenders were swiftly dealt with - either sunk or crippled and floating uselessly, or else badly damaged and turned around to head back home.

The men let up a few cheers as the bombards barked again, but they doubted it was over, and they were right.

More came, out from the shore, and this time there was no forefront of the  _ Rapier _ and the  _ Emerald _ to meet them first and stall them - they met the ketches as soon as they met the rest, raining cannonfire on them all indiscriminately.

The  _ Rapier _ shuddered as she twisted through the battle, groaning when her hull nudged hard up against another vessel’s. The eight pound guns on her top deck barked out sharply and one of the other ship’s two masts toppled, thankfully in the opposite direction, but in doing so it ensnared one of the other scouting vessels which was there to protect the ketches

Like insects, the men of that ship fled theirs and scuttled across the mast and sails and rigging onto the defending galleon, blades drawn and flashing in the early light.

For what aid they could render, the crew of the  _ Rapier  _ tried - letting off their swivel guns loaded with canister shot at the decks, both to inflict casualties and more importantly to distract. They did both, painting the decks red and drawing angered cries, sailors rushing to that side of the vessel to return fire - and, in doing so, lessening the guard on the side which was being boarded via the fallen mast.

There was hardly time to note it all in the fray.

One of the ketches lost a mast to a ball, and she promptly threw loose her anchors and began to turn to head out to sea, escorted by two of the scout vessels and chased by three defenders. 

The crew of the entangled ship - the  _ Emerald, _ as it turned out - managed to take the deck of the defending galleon and turned its deck cannons on its former allies, even as a few of the crewmembers dedicated themselves to keeping the hatches to belowdecks firm and defended, and belowdecks the cannons continued to fire at the  _ Rapier _ and her sisters.

As for the  _ Rapier, _ she was hardly unscathed; blood painted her decks again, splinters decorating her hull, and a hole about two feet above the waterline toward her stern from a lucky hit - lucky for the enemy to have hit at all, and lucky for her that it was not two feet lower.

One of the defenders punched a hole in the bow of one of the ketches, just at the waterline, and it swiftly began to list and lean forward. The air was a maelstrom of smoke and shouts, cannonfire and muskets and the clash of steel, the splash of water, the thump of wood.

Above it, though, the Captain of the  _ Rapier _ caught a familiar voice and a familiar sight; the flag which had been used to start their races at sea, being waved from the deck of the semi-captured galleon.

The  _ Emerald’s _ Captain stood high in the fore of the ship, waving the flag, shouting, gesturing - he gave the call to cut anchor for all ships, to turn and flee and carry on with the rest of the mission.

With his own ship still entangled in fallen rigging, there was no hope she could go anywhere, and the Captain of the  _ Rapier _ spared a desperate glance that way in time to see two men going aboard her and picking up the powder barrels from the deck, and taking them below.

It was clear from the grim expressions on their faces what they meant to do.

“All about,” the Captain of the  _ Rapier _ shouted, turning the wheel hard until the rudder hit its stops and directed the  _ Rapier _ out to sea, out past the prow of the half-captured enemy galleon.

As they neared it, the two Captains locked gazes and said in that all that could be said, they were outnumbered five to one and the enemy had a port within a few minutes’ sailing distance - ships lost and ships crippled, and one of their ketches already sunk with a second seeming likely if something drastic was not done soon.

Drastic and heroic are often separated only by a few things: perspective, context, and success.

The Captain of the  _ Rapier _ let go of the wheel with one hand for a few precious moments, long enough to hold up a crisp salute for his fellow Captain who returned it - returned it, along with a shout.

“The hands of God before the hands of the Dutch!”

Swallowing heavily, the  _ Rapier’s _ Captain nodded solemnly, calling back what he hoped would be comforting. “For Queen and Country!”

He hoped that, for the Captain of the  _ Emerald _ \- the soon-to-be-former Captain of the soon-to-be-former  _ Emerald _ \- it would be a comforting expression.

It most certainly wasn’t for him.

As they sailed off, the other ketch abandoning her anchors and turning to flee along with all three of the remaining scout ships,  _ Rapier _ included, the Captain kept his eyes dead fixed forward - focused on the two enemy vessels who pursued the fleeing and damaged ketch.

He didn’t look back when he heard the explosion.

It was deeper and more violent than any broadside could ever hope to be, making every piece of wood within the  _ Rapier _ strain at its nails and its fellows, every wooden bone of hers shaking as if trying to escape her for a moment - perhaps out of sheer horror for what happened in her wake as the  _ Emerald _ exploded outright, taking the galleon with which it was entangled along with her.

Two ships in an instant, their powder rooms consumed in moments by flashes of fire borne initially by two grim-faced men at the order of their Captain, but then carrying on in the nature of all flame - onward, outward, upward, searching for more fuel to consume; more powder lighting, exploding, sending flaming fragments of ship and sailor alike outward.

Two defenders nearby were nearly destroyed by the blast, masts toppling and hulls cracking under the force of the pressure; another four were crippled so badly they could not hope to pursue.

One of the two near the damaged ketch was sunk by the pair of scouts which had gone to escort it, and one of  _ them _ was hit in turn by the other pursuer, so solidly that she immediately began to flag and list.

The  _ Rapier _ bore down as if fuelled by the flames behind her, as if propelled like a cannon shot by the very explosion to which she had just bore visceral witness; she raced toward them as swiftly and surely and devastatingly as any cannonball ever had.


	13. 19

 

As a cannonball, she had no control to speak of; as a thrown rock, she had no choice, no thought, no malice in her actions, yet she flew. Water flew in sharp sprays from her prow like the wingtips of gulls skimming on the surface.

The men in the bow scrambled to reload the long nine as swiftly as they could, desperate to lend some aid to the fleeing and wounded ketch which was the reason they’d come this far, the reason they’d risked and lost so much - with only one mast, she couldn’t hope to outpace her pursuer, and had no large armament to fight assailants away.

She relied upon the others, the scouts like the  _ Rapier _ and the former  _ Emerald _ who had gone along, but only four of them now remained; two of them made their way away from the place where the ripples still shook, the waters themselves still trembling with the force of the  _ Emerald’s _ explosion, and they made their way slowly engaged with what remained of the defending forces.

One was up near the ketch, but on the wrong side to defend her, unable to fire with the ketch in between cannon and enemy.

Only the  _ Rapier _ was left.

Skimming, screaming across the surface still, borne on by the fury of the explosion’s hot winds at her back, she flew; they called her swift and sure, they always had, they said she was made for the water, and they had named her  _ Rapier _ \- and she earned her name.

The Captain twisted in vain at the wheel, the drum and pulleys, ropes and chain all doing their job most valiantly, but to no eventual avail. Her huge rudder slewed in the water, chewing a trough which ran deep behind her like a scar and spawning a thousand violently angry eddies and whirls, but doing very little to steer her. At her speed there was little to be done, and so very little time in which to do it.

Time never had meant much to her, though.

Whether the space of instants or eternities, seconds or months, she cared not; no more than any rock cares how long it takes the moss to grow thick on its sides, nor how long it takes to slough off in a landslide.

She knew nothing of time, only the water hard on her hull as she struck each wave with a vicious force that sent it spraying sharply upward; only the hot winds which billowed and belled her sails and urged her on, and on, until she fulfilled her namesake in an instant.

Her long bowsprit, half the length of her keel out ahead of her, stretched proudly - highlighted on all sides by spray, jibs flying brightly from it, extending like the horn of a mythical unicorn, and proving itself to be just as sharp as one.

The defending ship was broadside to her, and had thick gunwales to resist the fire of most moderate cannons; broad slabs of oak making up the hull, tightly held to the ribs underneath, but there had never been a thought toward a cannonball as large as the  _ Rapier _ was.

That was what she was, in that moment - she was her namesake and she was a projectile, flung like a rock and fired like shot, and she plunged through the other ship like a death knell.

Her prow dipped in the trough of a wave, her bowsprit plunging through below the other ship’s gunwale, that thickly reinforced band of hull around the top of her, and the  _ Rapier _ followed right through.

A thousand waves had split along her prow, dozens of storms breaking their fury upon it, and now another was added to that list: oak planks shattered and rent asunder, shunted to the side as the  _ Rapier’s _ prow followed her bowsprit as it always did; the men on her deck fell to their knees with shouts and cries, they slewed around like loose fragments or unsecured cargo as she rammed through the other ship, untethered jibs flying like a host of vengeful angels.

The deck buckled, the waves’ ever-shifting surface bringing the  _ Rapier’s _ bow up so that her bowsprit rose through the other ship’s top deck, cracking as it did so. Her Captain was flung forward hard against her wheel as her keel ran up over that of the other ship, as her prow struck solid against the gunwale on its opposite side and splintered it, but robbed the  _ Rapier _ of all her momentum in doing so.

All the men of her crew sent up a cry, a shout, a wail of horror and fear - but not nearly half as much as the crew of the other ship. They shrieked like gulls disturbed from their roosts as water gushed through their ship, the hull all but destroyed and the two halfs held together only by keel and some remaining structure in the gunwale.

It didn’t take long at all for that to fail, as water flooded the ship and weighed it down. The sea was always quick to take advantage of any opportunity to gain the upper hand in its eternal war on vessels, eager to grab with cold wet tendrils and drag down; Mother Nature always sought to take back what had been hewn from her, be it from forest to ocean or otherwise.

The  _ Rapier’s _ stern rose, her rudder peeking into the air as the other ship - which was resting in large part across her foredeck - became heavier and heavier as the ocean pulled it down.

She creaked and groaned in complaint, her hull shifting in minute measures against itself and against her keel; cracks widened where gravity pulled at them, and water seeped in through, but she was in better shape than her cohort, her prey.

The far gunwale of the defender gave way first, tearing free where the  _ Rapier’s _ prow had cracked it. The crew onboard the  _ Rapier’s _ deck pulled loose blades, fighting off the men who tried to flee their own vessel - they turned the swivel guns forward and fired canister shot into the crowds and painted everything bright red.

Two men, huge men - one of whom had once set his muscles behind an axe, and the other of whom had been a butcher, both of their strengths honed on chopping blocks of different sorts - grabbed at one of the eight pound cannons on the  _ Rapier’s _ top deck. They shouted and grunted as they rolled it and turned it, and from nearly point blank, they fired it at what remained of the other ship’s hull.

Like a taught band, a strap of leather holding up a satchel, the gunwale snapped as soon as it was given any provocation to do so - when it did, there was a terrible muffled noise as the keel itself below the water broke like a stick taken over the knee.

The ocean seethed as hull and plank, man and canvas, sank swiftly down into it - the water’s surface bubbled as if boiling, and then, it was all done. In a few moments, the other ship was gone entirely, not even a ripple nor bubble to signify its passing.

No ripple, no bubble, and no safety either.

Onboard the  _ Rapier, _ crew scrambled to make what they could of what they could - they hauled sails taught again to make speed away, they rushed to move bodies away to places out of the way as they said swift prayers that the men were only injured rather than dead, and they followed out the two surviving ketches into deeper water, escorted as well by the other three scouts.

Behind them, they left chaos clear upon the water’s surface, burning remnants of  _ Emerald _ and the galleon and a half-dozen other vessels scattered and glittering on the waves, floating chunks of wood and barrels and crates and bodies, fragments of ship and crew alike all strewn as one across the surface.

That was to say nothing of  _ below _ the water.

Not a one of them had eyes to see it, and not a one of them knew of the two dozen ships that lay sinking or already littered on the seabed, the anchors abandoned there, the fallen debris and bodies and cannonballs sitting like dark pearls in the sand and muck; not a single one of them saw it, nor knew it, all the devastation passing far beneath the  _ Rapier’s _ keel and hull and never touching her.

 

\---

 

She took on water from the first, but they could spare no men nor time to fix it until they were sure they were not pursued. They could not flee full speed away, slowed substantially by the damaged ketch, but that also meant the  _ Rapier _ filled less slowly.

They threw ropes across, as thick as could be found, and fastened them where they could between the crippled ketch and two of the scouts, the  _ Rapier _ and one of the others. With their canvas flying high and tight, the ketch’s prow lifted a few hands in the water and they began to make slightly better time.

Even better, once they shoved overboard the small cannons on the ketch’s top deck.

As they moved faster, though, the water pushed more solidly against the  _ Rapier’s _ bow; it began to spray in with all the more force and speed, and they could not bail it out swiftly enough. Her nose began to dip until they sent a man down to hammer rope and pitch into the cracks where he could, to nail down planks tightly, wielding a mallet with all the fervor of a cornered badger lashing out.

It did something, though, lessening the water from her cracked prow to a steady running series of rivulets down the inside of her hull.

The Captain ordered all weights shifted as far aft as possible, to raise her prow from the water as much as could be done, and that helped more - two men held the tunic of one as he hung over her front, gripping ropes and swinging his head down to see the damage.

Expectedly, it was great, the planks of her hull substantially cracked and warped where she’d struck the other vessel - but in far better shape than  _ it _ had been in the aftermath, as the man pointed out with a laugh.

Her bowsprit was shattered halfway along its length, the shards of it protruding outward like an angry assortment of jagged teeth; a man crawled out along its length and fastened down one of her jibs to it as he could, running the rope round its circumference and lashing it tight, and that pulled her chin up even a little higher.

The sun rose in front of them, and once the lookouts gave word that they were no longer pursued, the crew gave up a weary cheer.

They’d survived.

Or at least, many of them.

 

\---

 

Twenty eight dead, out of a crew of seventy six.

The Captain was given another commendation, aboard her afterdeck in drydock - as they ripped off broken planks from her bow and hammered in new ones, as they attached the heavy ropes from the crane to prepare for swinging her bowsprit away to replace it, they held a ceremony aboard her aft deck.

It had been scrubbed clean of all the blood, of course.

Scrubbed clean of blood and spilled gunpowder, and all the shards of wood from her own wounds or those she’d inflicted on others; swept free of all the detritus of battle and every sign of what it had cost, and they brought aboard five bugles and a trio of bagpipes, and a procession of officers with high plumes in their hats, and the priest had them doff their hats and hang their heads in honour for the dead, and not one of them said any of the men’s names.

The Captain stood, chin high, stiff-backed and square-shouldered as they pinned a medal on his chest; he received his award with a stiff salute and a strong-jawed stare, looking outward as they looked at him and applauded, watching them take the shattered bowsprit away from his ship and put another one in its place as they clapped for his quick thinking and audacity that had made the mission such a success.

New planks on almost the entirety of her bow, painted to match the others exactly and hide every scar from the battle; a new bowsprit and new sails, a patch for the hole in her side and a new pulley for her rudder where one had begun to sieze, a new coat of paint.

A new star, hammered in beside her name again, the planks which had been undamaged removed and reinstalled after the hull’s fixing. They fixed everything that had been damaged, and replaced everything that had been lost, including twenty eight new faces in her cabins and on her decks, and as she shipped out again they all waved and applauded.

They called her a survivor, a fighter; they called her a scrapper, as much a product of her birthplace as the people who inhabited it and prided themselves on indefatigability, on their relentlessness and unwillingness to give up - they said she was just the same, that she would go down fighting or never go down at all, they said she was made to fight.

They called her beautiful.

 

\---

 

Another battle, fourteen lost, and a new eight pound cannon where one of hers had exploded on deck causing two of the casualties and scorching a large section of her planks, littering the area with small fragments of iron and a large quantity of blood.

They didn’t bother removing the iron shards, nor replacing the planks; the boards were inspected and declared to be in good shape, and they scrubbed off the blood and soot and whitewashed that section of the deck again, and they sent her out to sea again.

The next battle, a defeat, and she returned with her gaff hanging limply from her mast and dangling from ropes and canvas. A new gaff, new sails, twenty five new faces aboard her decks. No new star.

Next, a nighttime raid where her storm lanterns were ordered extinguished for the entire time; the fleet ended up off-course due to a storm and nearly foundered on rocks, but they managed to turn themselves about and find the harbour they’d hoped for, and harried the enemy ships moored there.

Forty one dead, but the battle was pronounced a resounding victory; she was given another star, new planking on almost her entire starboard hull from where shore based cannons had chewed at her, and a new set of ropes and chains to her rudder.

Seventeen dead, a new square sail to replace the one which had been nearly tattered. Twenty three, another star and a new twelve pound cannon belowdecks. Twelve, a new coat of paint and reinforcements to her prow and gunwale. Nine, but no injury to her and no action take save for to scrub the blood free from her decks once more.

In a room, at a table, sat a man with a chart and a quill and a sheaf of papers; half a counting man and a half a tactician, and he tallied up one column and he totaled another, and comparing the numbers he made a decision.

After the next battle (fourteen dead) there was another ceremony aboard her. They had become commonplace.


	14. 20

They had become as commonplace as new boards hammered into place, patches on her ripped sails - they had become as commonplace as a sailor’s small effects, such as they were, being handed over to weeping women or stark-faced children.

They had become as commonplace as the Captain’s grim salute and firm spine - every bit as common a sight on her decks as blood had become, and often for reasons one and the same.

This one, though, was different.

Moored up at dockside, they came onto her decks with stands for flags, with a pedestal for the presentation and signing of documents; they came with a small roll of carpet, luxurious red velvet, laid down across her planks in a line. They came with small paintbrushes and pots of paints, and ensured that every chip or scratch in her decks and bannisters was filled and attended to.

She had always benefited from their attention, and the things they missed - the shard of glass still buried in the cheek of her figurehead - rarely meant any negative thing. This, though, was not any attention to function, this was not fixing or making her ready for anything that was really to do with her.

Though, they would have said that it was.

They would have said - and did - that it was entirely to do with her, that it was due to her speed and her fervor, due to her steadfastness in the face of risk, due to her unerring ability to survive. They said it was because she had four stars now alongside her name, and that she was swifter than any of her cohorts and deserved to run free and not be slowed by them; they said it was because she had been made to fight and made for the water, and that it was time for the two to be one.

They said, and would say, that it was because of a thousand things, but in truth it was because a man who was half a counter and half a tactician looked at a chart of numbers, compared figures, and determined that she would be an appropriate candidate for the mission; because he had taken a look over the reports of her Captain’s conduct, and deemed him to be an acceptably apt tactician and well-serving officer for the undertaking.

People, though, as they so often did, ascribed much to places where they knew no answer. Where there was nothing, they filled the space with  _ something _ , as they did with Mother Nature and with the winds and seas, they did everywhere else.

They said that it was all to do with her. They smiled at the look of her, all the attention focused on appearances in a minute way; she had become, for a moment, a showpiece. A rock taken and washed clean, and painted in excruciating detail to become a stage.

On her afterdeck, the Captain stood, awaiting whatever was to come. His eyes stayed fixed forward, lingering on the one and only jib which had not yet been totally replaced.

Below him, his crew, of whom he now recognized only a dozen faces.

She recognized even fewer, of course, bobbing gently on the waves and rubbing up alongside the dock; the footsteps on her decks were only indicators of the presence of people, not of their identity.

When an elaborate carriage was pulled up by gorgeous horses, and a new set of footsteps made their way across her boards - or at least, very nearly across her boards, rather staying entirely atop the rolled out carpet laid there - the footsteps gave no indication of who the person was, nor their intent.

They were only more footsteps.

The Captain recognized the visitor, saluting promptly; he was presented with and made to sign many things, not forced to with any weapon held to throat or temple but with the steel in the eyes of his superior officers attending, and the sheer weight of the presence aboard his ship.

One hardly turns down one’s Queen, after all.

He was issued further commendations, a promotion, and a letter of marque.

A letter of marque - a statement, a declaration of his ability to act with impunity within the war, he and by extension his crew and his ship, permission given to undertake the most drastic of measures to undermine their enemies at their very source.

That being, of course, shipping and wealth.

A letter, signed by the Queen herself, assigning to the Captain - and to her, the  _ Rapier _ , as well - a new role.

She was to be a Privateer.

A pirate with official sanction, a predator upon the waves, and they all said she would be ever so good at it, swift and vicious as she’d proven to be, and not a one of them amongst her knew of the wounds that had once been inflicted at another Privateer’s muzzle.

None of them knew the  _ Partridge, _ nor any of her crew; not a one of them had ever heard of a ship named the  _ Isobel Worth, _ and they knew nothing of her history, no knowledge and no memory of any such thing.

Nor, of course, did she.

She bore no scars from it, no longer - not since they’d taken the damaged planks out of her stern and replaced them, painting over it all afresh. Her beams and boards bore no sign of the vessel which had swept upon her unawares and attempted to take her over, and succeeded in taking over her brief compatriot.

Besides, she hardly knew it would be happening, anyway.

As the ocean’s swell rose and fell, still as ever quite like the gentle breathing of some giant creature, she rose and fell with it; as footsteps departed her decks, as commands were shouted, all she knew was the water.

It was, they said, what she’d been made for.

They took her into drydock the next day.

 

\---

 

When the next sun rose, it shone upon a very different looking ship. Her gleaming white sails were gone, replaced with off-white hemp canvas much more similar to those she’d first flown, but still with the same rig as she’d had with the Navy. Gone, too, were her paints of black and white - instead, she had been painted a dull yellowish brown overtop with accents of red along her bannisters.

Her gunports, no longer outlined in white, were now the same colour as the rest of her hull, blending in quite well.

Not a hammer nor saw had touched her, not a nail driven, yet they changed her name still and when the water met her planks next it was below bright white paint declaring that she was called the  _ Pomegranate. _

It was a name that they said had many meanings, from religious connotations meant to bring upon her safety, to darker motifs in the idea of something seemingly simple hiding a much more complex work within it: as the pips in a pomegranate would be her men and her cannons, and her motives, unseen from the outside.

They said much of it as they waved and cheered her departure, but she knew nothing of the sort.

What she knew was that the wind still filled her sails well, it still pulled her ropes tight - what she knew was that the water still parted easily from in front of her freshly painted prow and rippled smoothly back along the planks of her newly cleaned hull.

 

\---

 

She was every bit as good as they said she would be.

Small, and with only a single mast, it was easy to tuck her away in a cove and furl all the sails - to let them fly again at a moment’s notice to catch wind and pull her forward, racing across the seas toward her prey as they scurried to flee in vain.

She was very swift.

The first one she took without even being struck. Hiding in a cove, the lookout up the mast sent out a call - so very easy to miss, a single man atop a slender shaft with no sail nor flag visible - and she was deployed all at once.

The lower yard of her square sail fell along its ropes, trailing sailcloth behind it which belled in the winds as they hauled her mainsail up tight to the gaff as well, her jibs up from the bowsprit - the water seethed where it met her prow, where it was disturbed and rent asunder by the swiftness of her passage.

Her first volley sounded without the other ship even seeing her.

Unawares, they were facing the opposite direction when a hail of iron descended upon them in a fury of cannons, every gun aboard the  _ Pomegranate  _ loaded with grape shot.

They had no real desire to capture sails or sailors, after all, but a sunken ship was one whose cargo was that much less desired by its difficulty to access. One still afloat, but battered and beaten, was far preferable.

That first volley sent up a chorus of cries from her prey as they scuttled to react, but the  _ Pomegranate’s _ crew were already prepared and in motion - as was she, swiftly closing the distance.

As her prey tried to come about, to turn to face sides at the  _ Pomegranate, _ she carved through the water at the same rate as her prey’s turn, keeping herself almost dead astern. The crew let off with the swivel guns, the thumps echoing down below her decks.

Her rudder swept around, tightening her turn, and they pulled a pair of her sails tighter; she curled inward in a hook, one which ended with her prey, and her side nudged roughly up against the stern.

She sent up a brief complaint of creaks and groans at the force of it, but far less than many she’d weathered before and of no consequence in the long run; she withheld it as easily as the percussions of cannons again, or the strain against her bannisters as hooks and grappling lines were run across to the other ship.

This time, it was not her decks that were painted red - though, they were not free of it either. Not painted entirely, but mottled and splotched, red splashes highlighting the passages of those who trod over her after leaving the captive other ship.

Each splash, a footstep.

Her holds were filled with chests, gold and gemstones, and a few other things. One particularly marvellous painting was affixed in the Captain’s small quarters, a sun rising above a series of very low rolling hills covered in flowers.

A pair of cannons were rolled over, taking a dozen men each to move them, but providing a supplement to the armaments they already had - more shot and powder, as well, including a pair of barrels of each set simply upon her main deck near the mast.

She settled under the added weight of it all, all the takings and captures and treasures, but she still moved easily enough through the water when they cast off the lines and the other ship ceased rubbing at the side of her hull.

Some short distance away, her rudder came around to the stops again, and her timbers trembled with shot after shot - the captive two cannons aimed at the ship which had previously been their home - and after her prey was slipping below the waves, they sailed off toward the next.

 

\---

 

Cargo traded for cargo, a barrel of water being drank and then discarded, green-filmed on the inside when it was tossed overboard to join a slew of debris and flotsam, and its place was filled instead with a barrel stuffed with fine tobaccos.

A crate of canister shot, mostly expended, was taken up to her top deck to make space for a chest - locked, and wrapped in thick iron bands that resisted the crew’s greatest attempts to open it, but a blacksmith would be able to hew it open and the chest’s resistance only made the men all the more excited to find out what would be held within.

A pair of bunks, no longer needed after her crew suffered a few casualties in their altercations, were torn from the wall and thrown overboard and replaced with an elaborately carved chest of drawers, every drawer filled with handfuls and pocketfuls of gold coins.

Many of them bore insignia of the nation with which they warred, but many did not - many bore the crests of their own, instead, a familiar sight to home which must have been captured more than once for their presence there to be possible.

Nobody ever asked the coins, though, what their story was. No person asked them whose hands they’d been pressed into, what goods or services they’d ever purchased, which exotic lands they’d ever visited and how they’d ever come to be within the hold of an enemy vessel; they knew one part of the story, that the coins had clearly been captured at some point, and they knew that they were coins, and they told themselves that that was enough of a story to surmise all the rest - or that the rest of it might not matter at all, whether the coins had ever purchased a meal or a child’s rocking horse or a lover’s ring, it hardly mattered.

They were only cargo, now, the spoils of war. What did their story matter?

No more than a rock’s, surely.


	15. 21

As a cargo ship, as the  _ Isobel Worth, _ she had spent months upon months at sea - the better part of a year dedicated to a single leg of the journey, with all that that entailed.

Barrels of beer and water and rum, of smoked and salted meats or hardy grains that would not readily spoil; of thick dense tubers and thicker, denser breads; of little fresh fruit if any, and what there was was to be eaten within days or weeks at a stretch. Food and water, the fuels of her crew much as the wind and the ocean currents were the same for her, and as they hoisted her sails and trimmed them for the breeze, so too did they need to eat and drink.

Stories and songs and shanties, a few small instruments brought onboard or improvised - one man’s carved flute and two other clapping their hands and stomping feet rhythmically as the others chanted - and games, as well, of cards or dice or other small things, whatever could be picked up and put in a pocket at a moment’s notice. Distractions and entertainments to keep the crew from grating upon each other to the point of damage and destruction, much as her decks were scrubbed free of the salt that would in time eat away at the wood, as her ropes were rinsed free of the same from time to time to keep them from wearing too quickly.

The same had been true when she flew under the Queen’s ensign as a ship of the Navy, as the  _ Rapier, _ but to different extents.

Naval men still ate, of course, but journeys were no longer months at a time; battles would be the space of a few days, and mostly sailed to within a few weeks or less - sometimes it would not even be two weeks between one time with her hull rubbing up against the dock’s edge, and the next.

As a result, the stores of food and drink were lesser, and composed differently; uniformity being one of the hallmarks of the Navy.

The songs, games of joy or chance, the stories - the entertainments and distractions, on the other hand, were far greater in number.

Now, though, as the  _ Pomegranate, _ it was quite a different story.

Months at sea, now, without even touching a dock - yet, they resupplied on the water, taking from every ship captured or sunk whatever it was they needed or wished.

The men feasted in her holds, particularly in the wake of a capture; all the food that could be carried would be brought aboard, damned be how much the weight made her drag in the water - the men were hungry, and if no other ships were around they didn’t care about an even keel or a high prow nearly as much as food.

Every capture provided a feast, like hunters as they were: the food and drink which had been meant to sustain a crew over the course of weeks, instead consumed within a day or two, with whatever was left thrown overboard to free up space and weight once more - and such a  _ variety _ of food, too.

Crumbs of exotic breadstuffs littered her decks, gravies of foreign spice and unknown source slopping over her boards and sticking between the cracks even after the decks were scrubbed as cleanly as could be - ales and other liquors of strange scent and composition soaking and staining her planks in the crew’s occasional carelessness.

As much as they took for themselves, though, they gave to her as well.

Her holds filled with treasure, yes, and the men occasionally adorned themselves with the same, but they did not scrimp on extending as much to her - a crown, from one of their first ships made captive, was set with a joyous chorus of cheers upon the figurehead tucked beneath her bowsprit.

Two men clutched at the shirt and trousers of another, one of his hands gripped tightly onto a rope as the rest of the crew largely urged them on and cheered. The seaspray rose up to lick at the man’s face and wet his shirt, the ocean itself seeming to froth in anticipation of him joining it or perhaps at least dropping the gleaming gain in his other hand.

Not holding a rope, the other hand, but a thick crown of gold - heavy, and heavily adorned as well, encrusted with jewels in a way that was entirely unattractive to the eye and yet ever so darkly lustful to the heart for so, so many who might look upon it.

A joke at first, that the carved woman might wear it, had led - aided by the natural lubrications of liquor - to the two men holding the one over the edge, grasping tightly up near the bowsprit as the  _ Pomegranate _ rose and fell with the sea’s swell, and the man swung down and around and pressed the crown into place as well as he could do.

They passed him down a nail, which he held in his teeth, and another and another - one at a time, given his one and only free hand - and with every one, the men laughed, and then a hammer was given as well.

He spent a few minutes there, gripping nails between his teeth and swearing at the sea for being so near and so violent and so wet and so cold, swearing at the nails for being so sharp and so hard and so easy to lose track of and watch drop down into the waves, swearing at the hammer for being so difficult to grip as wet as it was and for being so easy to miss a strike with and hit the crown itself instead, swearing at the crown for being so easy to bend when accidentally struck with the hammer, and swearing at his crewmates for their occasional shouts of danger and intentionally fake-accidental near incidents of losing their grips on his clothing and letting him drop down into the frothing waves below.

Not that she, nor anyone else, could hear the swears, with him holding a mouthful of nails and with the sea so close and so much louder than him.

Regardless, he managed to pound a few nails in, striking them into the maiden’s head with blows from the hammer and then bending them over with the same, hooking them overtop of the crown’s rim - and when he was done, and when they pulled him back up red-faced and gasping over the edge, the maiden bore a crown on her head in addition to her pearl pendant.

The shard of glass still remained, unseen and unknown, but joined now by a half-dozen nails in the wood of the maiden’s head.

Entertainments, as it turned out - as the men laughed and clapped their red-faced and swearing compatriot on the shoulder - were not limited to stories, and not limited to belowdecks.

Not all they gave her was decorative, either, though much was. A pair of fine brass storm lanterns, hung at her foredeck - and then a trio, even finer, wrought in gorgeously delicate detail of gold and thin glass, hung at her afterdeck near the wheel.

A gift from a ship that had flow golden sails, the squares too tattered by its capture for them to make use of the wholes, but one of the sailmakers had asked for a day or two to work on something and they’d given it to him, moored up alongside the then-empty other ship and scouring it top to bottom for anything else as he took the three square sails down and slashed them, and fabricated a trio of jibs from the golden squares - all the men had grinned when they’d hoisted them from the  _ Pomegranate’s _ bowsprit.

Hoisted, and promptly taken down again; they were meant, from a distance, to look like any other merchant ship. Mismatched sails might be seen as a sign of their truth as Privateers, and ostentatious ones would only make them prey to the same.

Much as it had made prey out of the ship they’d taken the sails from.

The Captain, though, gladly said he would make space for the trio of sails in his quarters - he had three of the men help him in tearing out his bunk and throwing it overboard, and he slept atop the sails instead.

A pair of new cannons, too, and then the fortuitous day where they caught at anchor a much larger ship and snuck up and aboard her unawares.

The crew, largely taken ill, had given no fight and pled only for their lives - they’d been sent ashore, and the crew of the  _ Pomegranate _ had taken their fill, avoiding all the food of course for fear that it carried whatever illness had befallen the other sailors.

Amongst the captures, though, had been something else of great interest: a slew of cannons, all in brightly polished bronze, and perfectly sized to replace the lower guns of the  _ Pomegranate. _

Discussion was had about hauling them to the top deck and throwing them overboard, but this was discarded - one of the carpentry men suggested an alternative.

The lines between the  _ Pomegranate _ and the other ship were made particularly tight, the two lashed and moored together as one; her hull didn’t rub in the slightest against the other as they bobbed on the swells as a single unit, and then the carpenter - hung over her far side in a small scaffold suspended from ropes - began to pry.

He pulled loose planks and nails, sawing some where required, and in fairly short order he’d widened out one of the gunports enough to let the whole cannon be pushed through.

As he went in through the opening and crossed to the opposite side - making a similar hole there, and cutting one in the captured ship - the other men busied themselves with shoving the iron twelve pound cannons out of the hole and into the sea.

Each one sent up a tremendous splash when it hit the water, the ocean rebelling momentarily at the unwelcome and violent intrusion as it would have done with any cannonball as well, but shortly the waters quelled.

Thick boards were nailed in place, bridging the gaps between the two ships and angled downward in the  _ Pomegranate’s _ direction given how their decks were arranged, but it was plenty to let the cannons cross.

Every bit as large and even a little longer than the old iron ones, but shining brighter for their bronze; heavier in a lump the same size as iron, but with a lesser likelihood of bursting, cast a little thinner, and lighter as a result.

After the ten of them had all been replaced, five each side, the  _ Pomegranate _ floated a full three planks higher at the waterline. The strengthening crossbraces put in in the drydock didn’t carry the same strain they had, and that night as the sun set and she made speed away from the other vessel, she was skipping across the waves as she hadn’t in quite a while.

Not only objects came to join them, either. Food was a common taking, and gold or other valuables, along with whatever was needed to repair or replace for their ship, but there were other replacements needed as well.

Privateering was not a bloodless occupation, after all.

The  _ Pomegranate _ was swift, and she was sure - her crew came to be highly familiar with her, and with their work, and their cannons and their blades, and they worked together thoroughly, but no system is perfect and all things die in the end.

Occasionally, a lucky shot from a prey ship would eliminate a crewman - or a lucky slash, or a very unlucky bout of an illness. One man died when a sudden storm swell sent him off his feet, tumbling down and striking his head on a bannister; these things simply happened.

New faces could not come from port, as they had before, so they came from the captured crews instead.

Occasional disillusioned sailors of the other crews, or mutinous ones, or even simply those opportunistic who thought their chances better by throwing in their hat with the lot of the  _ Pomegranate. _

She came to be somewhat of a patchwork, as a result of it all.

Her sails were patched, and replaced where they could be, but not always with quite the same sailcloth. Different shades of white and offwhite, canvas made from both hemp and cotton, hung from her gaff and her yards and stretched up from her bowsprit.

Exotic woods dotted her decks and her hull in places, painted as close to matching as they could be where possible, but it wasn’t always. One hole which had been struck by a surprising shot from an enemy, a twenty four pound ball that had sailed cleanly through both sides, had to be patched with wood stripped from the captured enemy after the battle was over - and it was painted a bright red, not even nearly matching the rest of her hull.

They hung over the edge in scaffolding, and they tried to paint it to look like a flower at first, before one man pointed out that perhaps it should be a fruit.

A pomegranate.

Their best attempt was hardly high art, but it was a moderate disguise for the large patch - and it was hardly the only one, but the others were easier to hide.

Planks of other woods came to join the oak of her top deck, occasionally a little thicker and causing the men to stumble until they got used to the presence, sometimes a little wider and resulting in a creak against the plank’s fellows whenever she rose or fell in the sea swell, but meaning little difference in the long run.

The same was true of her crew, who came not to be solely men of one nation and one flag, nor even of one language. Newcomers were often treated with distaste and suspicion at first, but they did tend to be accepted after a few battles - after proving themselves allies of truth and not just convenience.


	16. 22

It became comfortable for them.

Even in the beginning, they had hardly been truly hesitant - they were, all of them, each and every sailor amongst the group, men of war after all. Whether firing with a fleet at their backs against a flotilla, or against a single enemy ship, they hardly cared.

Hardly.

A few of them, perhaps, at the start, but all things become smoother with repetition. Her own doors and hatches had once creaked and squeaked when opened or closed, but repetition had worn smooth all the tiny burrs and minutely widened the gaps, and now there was no noise from the hinges.

So it was with the men.

The complaints and grumbles ceased in fairly short order, where they had ever existed to begin with, and the men came instead to cheer and to laugh.

After two months of this, they were all quite used to it - and quite good at it as well. Many of them had been inexperienced on leaving port, never having felt a rope between their hands or sea spray lash at their cheeks, but now they had been honed on the whetstone of repetition; every day was an exercise in trimming her sails and controlling her lines, every fight was practice at firing - and always afterward as well, when they took what excess powder and shot they easily could and sailed out, and conducted aiming and firing exercises upon the ship they’d captured.

Some said they should be saving the ships, but they didn’t have the crew to spare for it.

Two months later, they were all quite comfortable with it all, quite practiced, and they’d fallen into easy routines. Her decks were swabbed, her lines checked over, her sails patched, her cannons rubbed with oil cloths, and it came time for their first meeting up.

The Captain had been given instructions, when and where to find ships dispatched with naval men but no such flags - like his own vessel, they would look like any other merchant or cargo vessel, but flying a small flag of half green and half black: a simple sign that the ship they’d found was safe.

Find it, they did, too. They were quite good at that.

Her rudder swept through the water lazily, like a great fish’s tail, changing her course slightly to compensate for shifts in wind or wave that would spur her from her track. She was sure, though, and swift, and before long at all her hull nudged up against another - for the first time in a long time, without her timbers being shaken by cannon fire first.

This was a peaceful procedure.

Cargo was offloaded, chests of gold and gemstones and artefacts taken from her holds, her hallways - even down in her bilge, a few, the coins themselves impervious to the water’s ill effects upon many other metals like iron or steel. Every hold and hole had been filled with something of value: coins, bullion, gems, spices, liquors, all of the fine things one might expect to find on the merchants of the high seas.

They were given congratulations from the officer aboard the cargo ship - not wearing his uniform, but clearly an officer still from the closeness of his shave to the way he held his shoulders.

The Captain of the  _ Pomegranate _ held himself just the same, and they saluted each other, and he was asked for a list of provisions needed for the next rendezvous.

It was difficult, though, to think of much they needed.

He had been in the navy for a long time, though, and knew how the men could sometimes be treated; he had seen it himself, in the weeks before any time he’d been given a medal or a commendation, he could still see it in the metal stars hammered into the  _ Pomegranate’s _ bow even though they’d been painted over now in some attempt to hide them.

They could perhaps be hidden, but their history could not be undone.

He made an urgent request for rum - the beer they’d been given had spoiled too quickly, he said, something stronger would be necessary. New bedstuffs as well, as an infestation had required them to burn all their cot covers and sheets.

Their linens were all quite fine, of course, unburnt entirely, but the men deserved some new sheets. They couldn’t be washed at sea, and they could have been replaced from captured ships but that would really only have meant trading familiar dirt for unfamiliar, and none of the men much liked the sound of that.

Much the same was true for the rum - they had plenty, and captured plenty, but the men deserved some particular celebration.

The officer made a note of it, and his eyes lingered briefly on the deck and the crew, but he went back to his ship without another word or mention and the two sailed off their separate ways.

The Captain watched them go, lowering the black and green flag and taking it down, while the  _ Pomegranate _ spared them no thought nor attention. She devoted her all, as she always did, to catching the wind in her sails and breaking the waves in halves with her prow.

She, like them all, became very good at it through repetition.

Ropes developed lays in familiar orientations, slight detentes in particular places, so that the normally adopted tacks for various situations were that much easier to find and to hold; the pulleys which saw the most use were the most well-worn, the easiest to spin for the greater gap between their pins and drums; her sails formed creases, like the skin of any fair lady as time carries on, and they more easily furled for it.

She complained when parts needed attention, no longer going into dock and having a swarm of men attend to her like ants crawling over her hull - now, when something was damaged or nearing the point of wear where it would no longer be useful, she would notify the crew through a creak or a crack, through a rub or a rattle, and they would in much smaller numbers deal with the issue.

Fraying ropes caught in her pulleys, irritating the men until they ran them out fully and had the rigger sit down with his back to her gunwale, and trim out the frayed section with his brass knife as he hummed a tune notably out of tune, and spliced the rope back together again so it would run smoothly through her blocks.

Ripping sails or ones that wore thin would make her whistle or shriek in the wind, hull planks that had been damaged by cannon fire or contact or simple time would leak the sea in through them like a widow’s tears and fill her bilge, hinges that needed greasing - on her hatches, her gunports, her rudder - would have her squeaking like an irate mouse until they lent their hands to fixing the problems where she could not herself.

The routines developed so easily.

The crew came to take more and more trinkets from their captures - a set of fine filigreed muskets, one for every man, with matching pistols as well. A pair of Spanish helmets, themselves surely captured from some other ship, that had the men staging mock duels on her decks to the laughter and delight of the others.

Every two months, they would return to the spot where they would find a ship with black and green flag - the first time, they were there on the day of. 

The second time, the  _ Pomegranate _ filled a little faster, and so they were almost a week early and simply waited. The third, almost two weeks.

Almost two weeks, and nearly a disastrous two weeks, as well.

Everything had been according to routine, their comfortable practices established, and if they’d been finding more gold than previously most of the men hardly thought of it. If the  _ Pomegranate _ was sitting several hands lower in the water than any of them had ever seen, they thought nothing of it.

When they put another six guns aboard her top deck, much larger eighteen pounders hidden below canvases but ready to be brought to bear at a moment’s notice - and brought aboard as well enough powder and shot to fuel them through a fight, set up around her single mast - none of them thought a thing of it.

So long as they ensured that her gun ports were far enough above her waterline, it would be no concern, they said. She was sure in the water and would not founder or struggle, they said.

They heard the creaks and groans, the audible complaints of her keel and ribs and beams, they must have. They had ears and so must have heard when, every time they shifted her yards and sails, her hull would grumble her discontent as she rolled languidly in the water to adopt their new course - they must have felt it in her rudder, when storm winds pushed them to the side and it took fully  _ three _ of them standing around the wheel to shift the rudder back to the line.

They must have known, yet they did not - or, at least, they said they did not.

She was sure, and a fighter, they said, and it would not matter if she was a little slower.

They had, it seemed, forgotten that she was a flyer at heart - but, she would remind them of it in time. All things in nature and the world have a tendency to, in time, return to remind those who do ill of what they should be practicing.

 

\---

 

It was during a night that they saw a ship, sails lit by lamplight and the moon, and they laid on more canvas to take chase. The  _ Pomegranate _ creaked in complaint but went, her prow plowing deeply through the waves and sending up great splashes and no small amount of noise either.

Still, they thought nothing of it.

Their prey - their opponent, as they always spoke of it - had no knowledge of their presence, not until the  _ Pomegranate’s _ bowsprit lit up with a great flash and a plume of smoke as her long nine went off.

It was their normal opening shot - the first step of a familiar dance for them all, and if their dance partner was a little more languid than she had sometimes been, they didn’t think much of it.

A little bit, though, as they trimmed her sails and brought her rudder over and she groaned, shuddered, and then swiftly rolled in the intermittent winds.

It was not a stormy night, not quite, but it was threatening them as much as they threatened the ship they bore down upon - half of the reason for their swiftness and concern was, in fact, the impending storm.

The other half was how the  _ Pomegranate _ lurched when they tried to bring her head around.

She went, though, her rudder carving a deep slash through the sea that was angrily filled with foam in her passing, and she brought about her broadside to the other ship as shouts rose from them - belowdecks, the cannons all fired, and on her top deck they did the same.

Every cannon rolled backward when it let off its flash and plume and ball, all five below and all now-five above as well, rolled several feet back from the gunwale and the hull on their carriages.

Already, she was heeling to port - when the cannons, and more importantly their combined  _ weight _ , shifted, the motion was only accentuated. The cannons slid another half a foot for her list, and that tilted her decks further, which slid the cannons another four inches.

Shouts of alarm and danger went up, those of her crew joining the more distant ones of the other ship, as the men began to realize that she would not right herself on her own. They scurried to let out her sails, to readjust them and pull her mast up in the opposite direction - four of them went to the wheel but were unable to budge it, unable with all their straining muscles and guttural grunts to bring her rudder around to counter her heel.

The list worsened, and more, until she looked quite like the  _ Partridge _ had at her worst - albeit with only a single mast. Additionally, a key difference existed: the  _ Partridge _ had been damaged, and the problem could not easily be rectified. The  _ Pomegranate _ , however, had a much simpler problem.

She knew it even if the sailors didn’t, in the way that a trees knows it is about to fall or a snow pack knows it is about to become an avalanche; they felt it in their tearing roots or their shifting masses, and she felt it in the strain on her beams and keel, the odd stresses in her mast as the winds pulled her opposite gravity - but it was not then the  _ winds _ that were the problem.

It was, entirely, the gravity, but that was as easy a problem as any to solve.

Another few degrees, the men all holding on to whatever they could that was lashed down - she tipped over far enough that her gunports on the low side nearly touched the water, the edges of them lapping like thirsty hounds at the sea’s surface.

On her high side, on the top deck, men held the ropes which hauled the cannons in tight against the gunwale. When she’d started to list, they’d pulled as tight as they could, but were unable to counter the off-balance - they now hung, straining desperately from their ropes, as she groaned and shuddered.

Her gunports dipped a little lower, water leaking in and rushing to join its brethren in her bilge.

A rope snapped, a pulley shattered, a man’s hand let loose and was scorched by the rope that then flew through it - for one reason or another, three of the cannons on her top deck at the high side of her list fell free, careening rapidly down across her decks and smashing into those on the opposite side.

Into, and right through, and within a few seconds six of her cannons had fallen into the sea.

Between the lessened weight on her top deck from the now-lacking cannons, and the added weight below from the water in her bilge, and the wind pulling her up, she swiftly righted herself. The men hauled on her wheel and she groaned as her hull slid down properly into the water again, higher than it had been.

After they’d dealt with the other ship, the Captain ordered the stores of powder and shot moved belowdecks. If it slowed their volleys, he didn’t care - and even further, he stated that only enough for a few rounds from each cannon should be kept in the main magazine. All of the powder would be there, but all extra cannonballs would be put in the bilge right atop her keel.

Not a one of them complained.

A great many hands patted at her shattered bannister where the deck guns had shot through into the water, including one thickly burned by a rope, and their contact felt like an apology.

Not that she cared. Once the excess water was bailed from her bilge she floated high in the sea again, and when they shifted the shot down so low she raised her prow even more, and had gravity pulling her upright rather than the other way around.

Things felt right again.

 

_ \--- _

 

On the fourth meeting - eight months after they’d left home - they were waiting in the spot again. Men always knew how to find their spots and places on the sea, or at least they said they did, even if the sea might beg to differ.

A little over a week early, they were, but it was of no consequence. They were filled as much as they could be without compromising her mobility - ensuring she still sat with her prow plenty high in the water.


	17. 23

A little over a week early, and never had one of their contacts arrived more than a day before the appointed time - once, in fact, they’d arrived two days late, and complained of a storm which had slowed their progress.

A little over a week early, and yet, not alone for long at all.

When another ship approached, the men first treated it with caution and suspicion. Soon, though, the ship flew the then-familiar green and black flag.

Flying it only by hand, though, waved from the decks rather than hoisted up the mast.

The ship approached with speed, and the  _ Pomegranate  _ went out to meet her as well, the Captain keeping a narrow eye at this strange turn of events, this disturbance of their familiar routine.

When the other ship drew in close, there was a boy standing at the rails - young, fresh-faced, and surely given the job because he was those things, because any man on the crew could point him to a task and he would do it; he stood, red-faced, shouting, indistinguishable at first for distance but the words soon coming clearer.

“...Queen and Country. Peace, I say - peace! The war is over, peace has been declared!”

He shouted it a few more times, as they drew up alongside each other and the Captain gave orders for lines to be tossed across, but the men on the other ship made no move to catch them and let them slide back. They swung out no plank, they didn’t scurry to fasten the ships for offloading cargo; they simply stood, and seemed to be trying not to look toward the  _ Pomegranate _ or her crew.

Perhaps there was nothing to it, though: the boy had said peace, perhaps there was no point offloading. They could do it themselves, in port - maybe that was the truth.

The Captain of the  _ Pomegranate _ looked across to his counterpart, the man Captaining the other ship, and met his eye. “Peace, is it? I suppose it’s over, then. We can go home.”

It was clear, though - clear from the grim set of the other Captain’s grizzled face, clear from the harsh look in his sharp eyes, clear from the barest shake of his head, that that was not to be the case.

He stepped to the bannister, and the Captain of the  _ Pomegranate _ did the same, so they were only ten feet away or so, and he shook his head. “No.  _ Peace. _ You’ve been plying these waters for months now, attacking the lines of those who are now our allies.”

“Attacking on the Queen’s orders,” the Captain protested, clutching at his vest. He always kept the letter there, folded up and tucked away in the event that it was needed. “I have Her letter of marque, right here - Her Royal Assent to this mission, I-”

Again, the other Captain shook his head, slowly and sadly - and the  _ Pomegranate’s _ Captain knew, even as he spluttered the protests, that that was all they were. They sounded small and desperate, a child begging not to be punished; he knew that, if the Queen deemed him an enemy of the Nation, he was to be so.

The  _ Pomegranate _ , not lashed to the other ship, began to drift slightly away in the swell. They’d nudged up against each other briefly, a moment’s rubbing of boards, but that contact and the sea’s natural spread caused her to slowly drift away from a ship where she’d expected an embrace; that familiar mooring, side by side while their crews went about their business, but now they separated instead and there was nothing either of the two of them could do about it.

“We were ordered to withdraw,” the man called from the other ship, throwing across a package bound tightly in leather. It fell to the  _ Pomegranate’s _ afterdeck, five or ten feet past the Captain’s feet, and he bent to pick it up.

“Ordered,” the Captain laughed - almost spat the word as he laughed it, sneered it as he opened the package but he already knew what its contents would be.

He wondered over only what the  _ price _ of their bounty would be.

Sadly disappointing, but perhaps there is no number one would ever be pleased to see as the price for one’s life - one would always hope, though, that it would be something extravagant. Something incredible, something absurd, the massive amount of funds dedicated to ensuring one’s demise.

In a way, that was still true, because it was not some ragtag bounty hunters who would be coming after them, but the Queen’s own Navy, with the wind and God at their backs.

A larger dedication, he could hardly have wanted for.

“You’ll be keelhauled for this,” the Captain called back to the other man in consideration - hardly one he could consider a friend, but he’d been ordered to sail away and had instead come to warn them. That counted for much.

The other Captain, though, waved away any such thought with a broad sweep of the arm and a guffaw. “Pah! Twenty lashes, at worst - but I’d gladly take a hundred if it meant keeping you in fairer waters, now go. There’s plenty of sea, find some where we’re not.”

For a moment, a long almost-silent moment filled only with the gentle creak of the  _ Pomegranate _ as she shifted on the waves, the Captain only glared at his counterpart on the other ship - his eyes flared like a furnace stoked to the full, but it was not that man or that ship who the hatred was for.

Whirling, the Captain shouted out, calling to the crew to haul on the sails and weigh anchor - they moved to, and swiftly, but not quite swiftly enough, because the rattles of chain and the squeak of blocks and tackle was overlaid soon by the lookout’s shout.

“Sail! Bearing the Queen’s ensign - for war, sir!”

The Captain looked around, and sure enough there was a ship coming around a peninsula of the coastline - moderately sized, razed, long and wide but low to the water, painted in the familiar scheme of black and white with her bright sails gleaming.

A paint scheme his own ship had once bore, when she was called the  _ Rapier _ \- when she’d been the tip of their spear and their bloody vengeance, and now they’d called her the  _ Pomegranate _ and made her a villain.

A villain they were here to end.

For a moment, as the men continued to move, the Captain thought. As the winds pulled the  _ Pomegranate’s _ sails taught - her anchor not yet fully weighed and causing her to list slightly from its drag in the water as six men ran ‘round the capstan to haul it up and she was borne forward by the winds - he thought.

There were a few courses available to any man, when cornered.

To flee, and the  _ Pomegranate _ was swift - she had always outpaced her prey, but this ship of the Navy looked swift and ready, and was not carrying holds full of gold and heavy items.

To surrender, but he’d seen the price printed on the parchment in that package, he knew that surrender would mean only his death at the gallows - if he was  _ lucky _ , at the gallows - and it would mean the imprisonment or death of his crew and the surrender of the  _ Pomegranate _ to the enemy, or worse, simply her scuttling.

The third option, then, was to fig toht.

His voice ripped out of him as swiftly and powerfully as any cannon shot as he turned away, facing the crew and the deck instead of the Navy ship that approached them from behind. They leapt at his word and hauled down ropes, as he spun the wheel hand over hand.

She sighed as she listed over, the water bearing along the side of her hull moreso as she made her way about; her keel cut smoothly and her rudder was solid on its pintles, and she began to turn to face at her enemy.

The Navy ship had pair of guns in their bow, wider than the  _ Pomegranate’s _ was, and they let both of them fly - iron balls the size of small apples or massive walnuts whistled through canvas, through rigging, through flesh as men screamed and fell to the deck either screaming still or silent and still.

“Blood for blood,” the Captain shouted, drawing out a sabre from his scabbard and hoisting it aloft, and the men let out a shout in unison.

They had become quite comfortable with it all.

Admittedly, this ship was larger than many they’d attacked, but not than all - more heavily armed than many, but not all. It had the advantage of surprise on them, rather than the inverse, but they had something they’d always had and which the enemy had always lacked.

They had her.

Even with holes, her sails held true in the wind as she tacked to make headway. The men rattled around belowdecks, moving things as they carried out steps of a familiar routine, and she did the same.

Her rudder swept as the wheel turned over, a few ropes flapping in the wind but soon being caught by the riggers who climbed up with brass knives in their teeth to fix the lines - she turned her bowsprit away, bringing the bow gun far and away from the oncoming Navy ship.

The opponent was sailing with the wind, bearing down upon them - without oars, the  _ Pomegranate _ couldn’t sail directly  _ into _ the wind, she had to tack back and forth at angles where only certain sails would hold any breeze, and she could not make full headway and would not be as swift as she could’ve been.

However, they’d developed a tactic that made use of that fact.

Instead of bring her head back around to tack back across the wind and cross the opponent’s course again, she turned further away.

It brought the Navy ship within range of every cannon on her side, while they were still pointed head-on and could only have those two small bow guns.

The Captain shouted out the command to fire, and it was swallowed up by great plumes of thunder and smoke which reverberated through her every space and beam, shaking through her and right down into the water which sent up tremendous ripples at the assault.

Their near-capsizing had taught them that weight needed to be kept particularly low, but they’d still been fortuitous. The brass cannons with which they’d replaced her original irons belowdecks were of a larger calibre, and roared with that much more fury for it.

Before they went far enough along for the Navy ship to meet them with a return, the  _ Pomegranate _ swung her head back around again and tacked back across the wind, bringing her in front of the approaching ship and to her other side.

To the other side of the  _ Pomegranate _ , as well.

Another ripping roar as her cannons let off in quick succession, not as one but as each gunner acquired his target - they’d become practiced in their months at sea, fueled by a need to be apt and also an abundance of excess powder and shot from every captive vessel.

In the Navy proper, true firing exercises had been rare. The cannons were regularly run out, the crew going through all the motions of loading to become comfortable with them, but there was never that thunderous percussion and the men with the linstocks gained no practice at sighting a target and firing upon it.

Powder and ball were expensive, after all, and only so much could be carried. How embarrassing it would be to expend one’s magazine in exercises, and be caught defenceless when the enemy arrived!

As such, the Navy only rarely conducted live fire exercises. The crew of the  _ Pomegranate, _ however, had had their fill of them.

As they’d had their fill of everything else.

The  _ Pomegranate _ picked up speed as her rudder twisted, bringing her back downwind to race and put distance and speed between herself and the other ship. They brought their bow guns around and fired again, but missed, the shots sending up a thousand small plumes from the water as a thousand shards of metal raced through the air and plunged hopelessly and harmlessly into the sea.

Her planks creaked as the heavy cannons, shoved back by the force of their own explosions, were swabbed and reloaded, the powder charge being rammed home before the ball, and they groaned when the cannons were run back out to the boards again.

The nose of each one popped up the door that swung down to cover the gunport during reloading, and the hinges didn’t squeak, well-used as they were.

Her rudder carved a deep swath at much higher speed, and she listed as she came around and slewed slightly through the turn, but swiftly brought her guns along one side to bear again. This time, they rolled like thunder through the distant hills - not one massive and decisive clap, but a thump after thump until one was hardly distinguished from the next, seven of them in succession.

One struck a mast, one of the two which bore the Navy’s proud white sails, and it - and its sails - went toppling and crumpling to the deck and the water.

They could likely have boarded, but that was a dangerous time and the Captain had no wish to endanger his men with it - they could have gone in close, and fired case shot from the swivel guns, but that would have opened them up to the same in return.

It was much harder to miss, from closer up, and at a distance the difference between his crew and theirs was much clearer. That was precisely how he liked it.

They tacked back across again, taking more time in firing the cannons this time - they didn’t follow one right after the other, but only slowly, the seven of them over the course of thirty or forty five seconds, but to much more devastating effect. Only one of the seven struck water, every single other ball hammering home into wood with a certainty met only by lightning hitting the ground.

The ship of the Navy began to list, and the crew set out a cheer - a cheer which began to fade as men scurried around on the other ship, their opponent, their would-be-predator turned prey.

A moment later, a white flag ran up her mast.

Surrender.

The Captain watched it for a good long while, the  _ Pomegranate _ still taking a lazy curve through the water at some distance out, circling warily like a dog around a wounded bull.


	18. 26

They took a moment to catch their breaths, to swab and once more load her cannons, and as they did they watched through spyglass or slitted eye the Navy ship listing heavily in the water. They wondered if there was some further surprise, some additional ambush to come, and wary eyes flicked to the cape as well.

To the cape and, on the Captain’s part at least, out to the other ship as well - the one they’d thought there to collect their bounty, the one which had provided a warning.

The one which had, at the arrival of the other, sailed off some distance for safety, but now had come about to return.

Return to render aid to one or the other of the two who had just done battle, or perhaps to flank the  _ Pomegranate _ , to trap her between the Navy ship and themselves.

Blood on her decks, again, gleaming in the sun as they sloshed water over and swabbed it away before it could stain too much, but there were limits to such a thing. Without the whitewash and long efforts given to hard scrubbing - the things which could only be afforded while moored - her planks came to be stained over time, over application after application of blood and seawater and debris.

The men threw their buckets of water over her top deck, and they ran their swabs over, but they could never remove that stain, that taint, and the Captain’s eyes came to linger on it.

His eyes, which turned hard, no doubt at the thoughts in his head; his eyes which narrowed as his lips did the same and he gave an order to haul on the sails, and spun the wheel round to make a heading toward the foundering ship of the Queen’s Navy.

The Navy which he had once proudly served, and slowly over time had both his pride and his service of the same stripped away, just as he could no longer manage to strip the blood from the planks of his own ship.

Not that she minded. Planks were planks, bloodied or otherwise, and she would never slip upon them nor turn up her nose at their appearance.

Small waves slapped against the fore of her hull, making noises which resonated through her bilge and holds, each one rushing through the next much like the waves themselves did until there was no way to tell one wave from the next and all one saw was ocean, until there was no way to differentiate the sound of one impact from the next, and all one heard was a constant noise of water and sea against her hull.

They came near the Navy ship, and the distant sound of shouting joined the nearer slap of the waves. Across her bow, the other ship listed heavily, a mast down and in poor shape - foundering, clearly, but not sinking and probably unlikely to do so.

Calmly, coolly, uncaringly, the carved figurehead beneath the  _ Pomegranate’s _ bowsprit looked out at the scene; with a crown atop her head and a shell in hand, she watched without reaction or movement as one of her one-time sisters struggled to keep her head above water, desperately trying to hold out against the sea’s eternal wish to drag ships under.

Calmly, coolly, uncaringly, just as her Captain did the same from her afterdeck, looking across with an almost cold expression on his face as the other ship’s Captain ran to the bannister and began to shout out, to call for aid.

For a moment, the Captain let him shout, and simply kept watching. No reply at first, not from him and not from the figurehead - the men slacked off the sails and the  _ Pomegranate _ didn’t slice through the water anymore, no longer cleaving her way through the waves but simply drifting, slowly, gracefully, up alongside the listing ship.

“Were it to be us flying the white flag,” the Captain of the  _ Pomegranate _ shouted, bitterness as clear in his voice as in the twist of his lips, “would you lend  _ us _ the aid you call for? Or would you see us at the seafloor before you’d see us free?”

The sounds of the waves reigned again, soft but louder than the silence that hailed from the Navy ship - almost even inaudible, themselves, but still far far greater against her hull and through her holds than the total lack of any response from the other Captain.

The silence hung in the air, as did the question before it, for another moment or two - another dozen or two waves to slap against her stern and at her bow, before her Captain barked a single laugh. “Ha! That’s what I thought.”

All hands port to fire, that was the order he called - the words he shouted as he locked eyes with his counterpart, with his one-time ally, turned predator and assailant, turned prey - a short sharp order that was followed by thick huge thumps as seven cannons bellowed once more, leaping back from the rails and gunwales as their percussions echoed through the holds and bilge and drowned out any hint of waves and any sound of sea.

They rang like church bells - she did, like a church bell, echoing that sharp cavalcade until it began to subside and gave way not to the waves once more but to a different chorus instead.

Men of the sea might have called it the most damned host of sounds they ever could hear.

Twisting, snapping timbers and the gush of water, bubbles and screams and ropes snapping - the other ship had been devastated by such a volley from such a near point, her other mast fell and draped sailcoth over men who tried to leap into the water and make their flight to freedom.

As she sank, she broke apart further, timbers twisting and cracking, tearing apart either where they’d been nailed or simply along their lengths.

The holds of the  _ Pomegranate _ rang with the sounds, dull and distantly muffled by the water’s enveloping embrace. Still every part of her resonated with creaks and groans as she felt, in the vibrations of her beams, as a rock feels the rumble of the Earth, the last dying cries and sounds of a former ally being consigned to the depths.

Nobody - not any of the crew, and not the  _ Pomegranate _ herself, heard the sound of the shattered keel settling to the seabed below. It was far too deep, and not even a shred of the sound made it back up near the surface.

There were soon other sounds, though, catching in her sails like the winds - shouts and shrieks, and cries of “Traitor!”, and more, as the other ship approached. They began to turn aside, to bring their cannons to bear.

The men had little practice with firing their cannons, and with controlling their ship at the same time; some of them fired too early, some too late, and only a single ball struck the  _ Pomegranate _ at all - up high, in her gunwale, cracking the thick wood and turning it to splinters but not penetrating.

It took only a moment, the  _ Pomegranate _ swinging her rudder through the water like the tail of a shark, for her to bring the other ship directly off of her starboard side. She shuddered again with another salvo, leaving the other vessel tattered and ruined, and she sailed close.

“We are not the traitors,” her Captain declared, brandishing his sabre high and then jabbing it back behind him to where the water’s surface was still unsettled by the ship which had disturbed it. “They, they are the traitors - they who called us friend and now throw us to the wolves! They who would not have permitted us life, even in surrender,  _ they _ are the traitors. What say you?”

“I say you’ll hang for this,” spat back the other Captain - the one who’d come to offer a warning and now offered only threats in stead. “Even if I must watch you from below the waves or above the clouds, I’ll see you hang for it!”

A moment of silence, broken by a laugh - that of the Captain of the  _ Pomegranate _ \- and her crew followed suit, followed their Captain.

The ones who had shipped out with him from dock, some who had never been aboard a sailing vessel before but had been taken under wing and taught which ropes to haul and which to avoid, which came taught first in a storm and would catch a man’s arm right off if he were not careful, the ones who had been powder boys and now were sailors, they laughed.

The ones who had been prey to them, aboard foreign ships of foreign nations, speaking foreign tongues - who had seen the sails bearing down upon them and had taken up swords in defense, but had been overrun and had given their lives over in service, either due to hopelessness or due to desire to achieve something greater, to escape the trappings of the lives they had been leading, they laughed.

The ones who had sailed with the Captain under the Queen’s battle ensign, the ones who recalled the massive stature and bulk of the  _ Bulwark _ and knew it might mean a battle they could not win, the ones who remembered the horrid explosion of the  _ Emerald _ and wondered whether they might be the next in line for such a thing, they laughed.

Every one of them, every man of the crew, began to laugh until the Captain swung the wheel around and the  _ Pomegranate _ began to turn away from the other ship.

“You’ll do no such thing!”

It was the only parting shot to be offered, not a cannonball but an ultimatum from the Captain’s lips, and followed by no volley of grapeshot but rather a constant salvo of laughter from the crew which grew more and more distant as they sailed off.

They made fast, hauled down the lines and ran before the wind until the area was out of sight and the other ship as well. The Captain told them to bring down her jibs and they did, and they replaced them with the bright gold ones captured from another vessel, and every man cheered as they hoisted the sails and they shimmered in the sun.

With the wind at her back and cheers in her sails, the  _ Pomegranate _ sailed on, leaving behind another land and another life as she had so many times before.

 

\---

 

There were tales, amongst sailors, of many things. Krakens and sea-monsters, sirens and mermaids, beasts and beauties of the deep each as deadly as the last or moreso - of maelstroms and elementals which would rend a ship asunder as easily as swallow her whole, of dread crews damned to sail the sea undying and undead but unliving as well, the sun never warming their accursed skin as they preyed on others and took what they could no longer attain for themselves.

Tales of might and glory, of islands with cities of gold and cities of skulls, of giants and more, of volcanoes rising from the sea with dragons within them - but every dragon guarded a dragon’s hoard.

Hundreds of stories and songs, or more - thousands - but amongst them were those of more worldly concern. Stories of stormy seas where ships would sink without warning, of great gyres which would toss a vessel about until her keel snapped like a hare’s neck, tales of pirates and vagabonds galore.

Maps and charts were variously decorated with these all, with tentacular beasts and maidens upon rocks warning their readers of danger, but with somewhat more rigor they detailed the more mundane things: the reefs, the gyres, the sandbars.

The pirates.

It took them quite some time to cross the ocean, striking out across open seas. At first they were not the fastest, still tending to some wounds from their battle - through the night, men climbed into her rigging with brass knives clutched in their teeth and storm lanterns tied around their necks on shorts sections of rope, tending to her lines, splicing the frays or damages, mending the tears in her sails with needle and heavy thread.

Come morning, she ran more swiftly before the wind.

Water leaked into her bilge, and they took it out with buckets given hand over hand up through the hatches and overboard, as men worked with hammers and pitch and rope, caulking her seams as they could, and the leak became a bare trickle.

For a while, she split the water with great speed again, but there came storms which slowed her - and the aftermath did as well.

Harsh waters and winds whipped at her sails, ripped at her boards, and in the wake of each one her prow would be lower in the water and the leak into her bilge greater once more. It was only fair, only fitting; in her wake, the sea was disturbed, and in the wake of the sea, so she was.

The lookouts kept their eyes trained all the sharper for land.

Their holds lightened as food was eaten, water drunk, beer spoiled and thrown overboard sour and followed by the outspewed stomachs of the few men who’d drunk it too swiftly without tasting it first.

A few came sick, and one who had been wounded in their last fight failed to recover well, and they were all taken and wrapped in the old off-white jibs and weighted down with a cannonball, and each one was given a pair of gold coins in his wrappings as well, and dropped into the  _ Pomegranate’s _ wake.

The lookouts kept their eyes trained all the sharper for sails.

Days carried through into nights, but the men kept their spirits fairly high with games and with chants - the crewmembers from captured ships and foreign lands had new ones, new songs and new games with dice or cards, and the sharing of them was a great joy to all.

Barrel after barrel, water and rum ran dry.

The Captain took one of the sailmakers aside and asked him to take one of the old jibs and cut a rectangle out of it, to hem the edges and make them fast. They took it belowdecks after that, and crammed it down into the bottom of an empty barrel of rum - empty of rum, but not fully empty, because at the bottom was always left a few inches of thick black sludge.

A few of the men had tried to drink it, but it was hardly a pleasant thing; generally, it was done at dock, in the taverns - screech, it was often called, named for the noise that would be made when a man drank it.

This time, though, the barrel sludge was not drunk but served another purpose, and the canvas set in the barrel for weeks, being turned over from time to time to ensure good coverage, until they made land.

A small island with warm air and warmer sand, fine enough that it felt almost like silk, and the men laughed as they fell to their knees in it. For a few moments, they only rejoiced, and then quickly got to work.

A mark was made in the shoreline to gauge the tides, and they spread out with axes to gather what wood and materials they could - they started a fire, and a trio returned from exploring to announce they’d found a swift-flowing spring, a few men went and started to fish at the shore and where the river met it.

The  _ Pomegranate _ bobbed in the tide, and the men gauged by the mark an hour or so later that the tide was coming in. They marked again, and again, and when the water hadn’t moved from its place an hour later they called it high tide.

They brought her in toward shore until her hull rubbed up on the soft sand, soft and wet and giving way beneath her weight to cradle her; they hauled ropes onto the land and ran them to trees, and turned a pair of great capstains aboard her to pull her, inch by inch, up the shore as they could.

Plank by plank the waterline dropped as more and more of her weight was borne by sand rather than water, and she creaked in complaint at it but not greatly. The warm sands meant little to her hull, but she slid without too much effort over them.

As the tide started to leave and the sun started to set, the men went about her, scraping at barnacles with the backs of their blades and trying to clean her as best they could. Three of them went to her bow and began to pry or cut boards loose to patch the leak which had been apparent and ever-worsening there, and the fire was stoked higher and higher until it roared in the twilight which set in.

The Captain gave a command, then, and a crewman still aboard her went to carry it out. He took up that piece of sailcloth that had been shoved into the barrel weeks ago - now stained completely black throughout by its dwell in the sludge at the bottom of the rum-barrel, and onto which they’d stitched other pieces of white sailcloth to make a design - and he hoisted it up her mast and let it fly from the top.

Two cutlasses, from white sailcloth, and a skull as well - and a crown, atop the skulls head, in homage to the crown on her figurehead’s own brow - had been stitched onto the now-black flag, and the men all let out a great cheer as it was hoist and waved in the wind.

Then, the Captain himself climbed up a rope ladder onto her deck and went to her bow. No longer men of the Navy, they were - no longer men of the nation that had called them criminals and called for their heads, he declared, and he leaned over the bannister with a knife in hand and scraped away at the paint.

_ Pomegranate _ came to be peeled away, flakes of paint coming free and falling down to the soft sands below as twilight gave way to firelight entirely and the men urged the Captain on with cheers and chants, the fishermen cooking their catches on the flames for all to share.

Next came  _ Rapier _ , to be scraped away as well, the Captain baring his teeth and desperately tearing at the name with his blade as if by scraping it away he could chase away all the memories of it, all the blank new faces which had filled his crew with every return to dock.

He was expecting, below that, to find raw wood - to take a small pot of paint, and a brush, and to put in a new name of their own devising.

What he found instead, though, was another word.  _ Isobel. _

There was a gentle murmur amongst the men, similarly surprised, but the Captain had the paint near at hand anyway and had no strong negative association with the name. It seemed a good enough name, certainly, but perhaps not quite fitting, not quite enough.

He added a prefix; leaning over the edge with brush in hand he prepended another word, and in doing so, made her the  _ Lady Isobel. _

Through the night, they cheered and danced and drank and ate, they drew in great mouthfuls of the spring water captured in their barrels after they’d been washed free of the green slime, they ate deeply of the foreign and unfamiliar fishes roast over the flames, and they laughed at their newfound freedom.

Spurred on by their Captain’s moves, the small but clear demonstration of altering the ship’s name, they made more such changes into the night.

One man - not the same who’d hammered the crown into her head - clambered onto the bowsprit, nearly falling off for his drunkenness, and hanging there he painted thick black tears running down the face of the maiden who was her figurehead.

Another - one of the carpenters - took a hand drill and saw, and had one of the riggers tie up a quick harness of sorts in which he could hang; he cut away the seashell and bored a hole through the maiden’s hand there, and thrust into that hole the grip of a spare sabre which had been in their holds: she held it outstretched, a commander leading a charge into battle with her face streaked in black tears and a crown on her head.

They did not have enough in the way of resources to do all of the things they wished, or thought, but they all knew there would be more time to come - as the night gave way to even further blackness and they stared all up at familiar-seeming stars but in unfamiliar formations, they laid and smiled and rejoiced in the victories they’d had, in fleeing, in surviving, in finding land to resupply and carry out their repairs. They planned out what it was they would do in the near future, as well.

They called her their salvation, their saviour; they called her gorgeous and they called her vengeance, and they said she would be a thousand things. They called her the  _ Dread Lady Isobel _ and thought they might paint that on.

They called her she.

As the night went on and consciousness faded from them all, the  _ Lady Isobel _ sat high on the sands with the tide having long since abandoned her on its unending cycle of ebb and flow. She sat, drying in the warm air and the night, creaking occasionally with breezes, flying an unfamiliar flag but not caring for it in the slightest.

She cared only - in a sense - for the sections of wood on her hull where metal had perhaps bit too deeply in the quest to remove her of barnacles and shells, and where the paint had been removed and raw wood now sat exposed. Even that, though, she hardly  _ truly _ cared.

Only as much as a rock might care for the water flowing over it which would surely in time mean its demise, only as much as a tree might care for the worms which burrowed deep in its trunk.

Up on the shore, leaning slightly to one side, she sat, until the sun would dawn on her again.


	19. 27

They stayed for a few days on that island, her and her crew as well. The crew drank deeply of the spring water, rinsed out their water barrels and refilled them, ate heavily of caught fish roasted over the fire, and they took tools to her and the island as well to make repairs where needed.

She, on the other hand, simply sat - up above the waterline even when the tide was in - as sun shone on her decks and then moon again, and then giving way back; she sat, as they pried at her planks and bits in with saws and drills, and smashed loose boards which were rotting, and replaced them all with fresh wood and hot pitch boiled over the fire.

After a few days, the crew began to dig out a trench behind her - leading from the water up to her stern, and even underneath where they could. They hauled all the barrels of water aboard her, they lifted up a sack of sailcloth they’d filled with coconuts, and then they let off the ropes which held her to the trees, and then they waited.

The water came in, rising up the beach in slow sloshing waves, and it lapped at the sand berm which still sat under her keel. Lapped and softened, and eroded, and her keel settled as the sand became sludgy and her weight displaced it.

When she started to settle, they pushed - her sails set somewhat awkwardly to pull her away from the beach as they could - and as the water rose up the trench and her stern sat in it and began to lift, the men had the strength to push her out to sea.

Bootless, with their trousers rolled up above their ankles, they pushed her out into the surf with cheers and laughter and then grabbed onto ropes that hung down from her bannisters; down past them and dragging in the water and the sand as they climbed and clambered.

Footsteps on the outside of her hull, not so unfamiliar, and she had no reaction to them - no reaction to it all save for to creak in relief as her hull bore her weight in the waves again, as she felt the water lapping at her hull in the same way a desert rock felt the rain.

She was afloat once more, and they were all on their way.

 

\---

 

The area was mapped, but the maps that the Captain had were his own, and were somewhat out of date and not necessarily of the highest calibre. Islands appeared that were unwritten, and some were absent where they thought to see them, but none of them ever doubted the Captain’s heavy astrolabe or his eye, or his mind.

Onboard her decks, laughter abounded, and shanties as well. The men found their way to her bannisters, grinning wide in the warmer sea spray; the water felt less hostile here, and being wet was not such a detriment to them where the warm sun beat down.

It was not a week later that they were passing an island at some distance when the lookout sent up a shout of sails.

A ship emerged, from a sheltered cove, and as soon as it was seen it was firing; the first shot from it was not nearly a hit but landed some few dozen feet off of the  _ Lady Isobel’s _ bow and sent up a high plume of water when it did, like a whale breaching the surface.

The Captain told them to return in kind, turning the wheel over to let the cannon find its sights and let off a similar warning - a single ball where there could have been seven, and landing some safe distance away from the other ship.

Some safe distance, but also not so far as to avoid all worry entirely.

A flag rose up one of the other ship’s twin masts; a black flag with a man in armour, a spear in hand, all rendered in white.

The pirates and buccaneers of the world flew under no one flag, no unified government or hierarchy, but there were often similarities between them. More successful members might amass small fleets of ships, even, all flying the same flag - but, generally, white on black was a common theme.

Shared motifs, as well, of skulls or skeletons, crossed blades or bones, hearts being speared; a black background was a warning and meant quarter would be given if the crew surrendered.

A red background meant no quarter.

The Captain of the  _ Lady Isobel _ eyed the other ship’s flag as he ordered his own be raised, the one they’d made and first flown on that island.

_ Lady Isobel _ was filled with tension, not hers but that of the men which crewed her; they stood alongside their cannons pulled out to the boards and they waited with linstocks smoldering in hand, and they hoped that it would not come down to a fight.

Ropes creaked through pulleys and then the flag flapped in the wind, snapping and pulling out broad and announcing the  _ Lady Isobel _ as a pirate vessel herself, though she’d never been given any input on the matter.

Neither, of course, had the other ship.

When the flag flew high, the spanse of the sea between the two ships came filled with laughter a few moments later as it drifted over from the other ship; she came in closer, and the Captain turned the  _ Lady Isobel _ to do the same.

Her hull nudged up against her counterpart and they bobbed alongside each other, the men wary but neither ship having any complaint for it; the  _ Anna Marie _ , the other ship declared herself to be in bright brass letters formed and beaten into her wooden bow.

The men called across to each other but didn’t cross decks just yet, no board linking the two nearby ships as they rose and fell in the sea’s gentle embrace; they asked queries and largely denied answering them, they tossed back and forth bits of fruit or coconuts and flasks of rum, and the Captains conversed on what they had seen or not seen recently.

Onboard the  _ Anna Marie _ , the men resembled their ship very much; seemingly built almost from tatters, but fearsome at the same time - patchworks, man and ship both, but sturdy looking and serious patchworks despite their laughter and joviality at the moment.

In a way, the  _ Lady Isobel _ was the same, both she and her crew more obviously a whole thing which had been repaired as capability permitted, from whatever had been at hand, but ended up not necessarily weaker for it and in fact quite the opposite in ways.

“A beauty, I don’t recognize her,” the Captain of the  _ Anna Marie _ called over, raising his flask in a toast to the  _ Lady Isobel _ and drinking it back.

“New to these waters, but not to these engagements,”  _ Lady Isobel’s _ Captain replied with a shrug, and a small smirk growing at the corner of his lips, curling like vines up a trellis. “We could have a little race, if you like…”

The  _ Anne Marie _ erupted with laughter, not her own but that of every man aboard her following their Captain in kind, as the man in question guffawed beneath his broad black tricorn and slapped at his knee.

“You think she can outrun the  _ Anne Marie? _ Look at my prow, boy - see that’s not the case!”

A series of skulls and anchors were painted in beneath the name in proud brass, twelve skulls and some twenty anchors.

“Every skull a sinking and every anchor a surrender,” the pirate Captain explained, “and every man jack of them thought they he could outrun the  _ Anne Marie -  _  so what makes you any different, aye?”

On the  _ Lady Isobel, _ the men didn’t follow their Captain when he chuckled, but only because they did not know that he was - he crossed his arms and did it softly, quietly, not a showy gesture but only one of amusement as that ivy grin crawled further up the side of his face.

He called out for a chest to be produced, from one of the holds below; when the men brought it up and flipped it open, its contents of gold were clearly displayed, glimmering bright in the sun and catching the eye of every man who looked that way.

“If you can beat us, you can have it!”

There was no laughter from the crew of the  _ Anne Marie, _ and none from their Captain as he rubbed thick fingers thoughtfully at his beard, and then called out swift orders.

Two men took a rowboat from the fore of his ship - seven of them there, upturned and stacked like dishes in a public house - and they lowered it down from a small gantry and cast off, and began to row out.

They rowed and rowed, growing smaller in the distance, as their Captain’s eyes stayed fixed not on them and not on the gold clearly displayed, but rather on the Captain of the  _ Lady Isobel. _

“You weren’t lying when you said you’d been at this a while,” he called after a while.

“Let’s hope you weren’t when you said she was fast,” the Captain of the  _ Lady Isobel _ retorted with a laugh, and this time his crew did join in - and so did that of the  _ Anne Marie _ and their Captain as well.

It was like the  _ Emerald _ again and that small flotilla that had gone with her, back when the  _ Lady Isobel _ had been called  _ Rapier _ \- like that, but through a strange looking glass, though none gave voice to that idea if it occurred to them.

It certainly didn’t, to her; the men did as they did, they painted this name or that, and it was of no matter to her until it came to harm.

Laughter trailed away, replaced by a sort of anticipatory tense stillness, not so different from when they’d first approached each other but with less worry and fear. Hands set tight on ropes, ready to pull them from cleats and haul as needed; feet set solidly on deck, determined not to slip and fall.

The Captain of the  _ Anne Marie _ drew out a pistol from his side, a wheellock - one of two, made of dark wood and bright metal with silver inlaid along the short stock and into the grip - and held it aloft. When it fired, its plume and bark signaled to all that the race was on.

Ropes snapped tight, sails flapping in the wind and then filling, rudders sweeping as each Captain tried to tack his ship to make the best possible effect of the wind. At first, the  _ Anne Marie _ took the headway, pulling off to the starboard and forward as well.

She took lead by the bowsprit of the  _ Lady Isobel, _ and then further, and then the farthest out tip of that long sharp bowsprit of the  _ Lady Isobel _ could barely have touched the furthest aft board of the  _ Anne Marie’s _ stern even if she’d been following direct in line.

They bore down, each of them, upon the men who’d taken the rowboat out - at the pistol shot, they’d stopped rowing, and now sat in their boat and watched the two leviathans approach.

A slight shift in the breeze, a slight change in the current, that was all it took; all it took for the  _ Lady Isobel’s _ golden jibs to catch the wind that little bit more, shining in the sun and pulling her prow another hand up out of the water.

Waves dashed across her bow and scattered back along her hull as she began to truly run, a slightly sluggish acceleration at first giving way to an almost blistering top speed; she caught up with the stern of the  _ Anne Marie, _ and then was at her prow, and then past, and her Captain waved with a grin as they did so.

By the time they made the rowboat, the  _ Lady Isobel _ was a full five shiplengths in the lead, and still pulling away faster. The men let slack some lines and hauled others tight, the Captain gave her wheel a spin, and she groaned as her rudder carved a deep gash in the ocean which protested with a roar of bubbles and turbulence, but it brought the  _ Lady Isobel _ back around and slowed her some, and soon she was side by side with the  _ Anne Marie _ again.

“You call her a Lady, but she sure runs like a temptress!” The Captain of the other ship announced, clearly flustered but also impressed. All the men laughed, even those who didn’t speak the language well enough to understand the implications, and the crew took the chest of gold back down into the holds of the  _ Lady Isobel’s _ belly.

“Temptress, I do like that,” her Captain called back. “If I had no name, I’d take that one! Alas - and good day, sir, here’s to good winds and your back and calm seas!” He held a flask aloft in a toast, tipping it back.

“Aye, to you as well,” the other man returned, and then drew from his belt one of the two wheellock pistols. “Here, too - you ventured on the race, it’s only fair I would as well. Take this as your prize.”

The pistol glinted in the sunlight as it flew from one afterdeck to the other, the  _ Lady Isobel’s _ Captain catching it in both hands with a grin and sticking it into his belt. They were an uncommon occurrence though hardly unheard of, and certainly far preferable to the smoldering slow match required by the muskets his crew was using.

“A princely gift,” he called back with a wave of thanks. “I’ll keep it in mind if we cross paths again!”

The Captain of the  _ Anne Marie _ guffawed, taking a step forward to the bannister. “You could repay me with a drink! Are you coming in to Port Royal?”

With a grin and a glance to his crew,  _ Lady Isobel’s _ Captain replied, “Aye, sir, and with all speed we can muster!”

“Ha! Perhaps not  _ all _ the speed,” the other called back, waving his crew to their posts to make ready to set sail. “After all, we’ll need to keep up with you yet…”

Chuckling to himself again, the Captain of the  _ Lady Isobel _ swung her rudder round and they began to make way - letting the  _ Anne Marie _ take the lead, for she knew where to go.

At every post, the men were joyous, urged on by their victory of sorts; they laughed and clapped each other on the back and said well done, and they slapped her on the bannisters and beams as well - and one even fell to his knees and pressed a kiss to her deck, and was met with laughter and then two or three others following suit, an homage of sorts being paid.

They called her beautiful, they called her theirs, they said she was the finest thing they’d ever taken and they said she was wife to them all - they called her cruel as any Temptress and clever as any Lady, and they said their thanks to her as they sailed off underway.

Against her hull, foreign waters beat a familiar pattern, the unsynchronized tempo of waves on wood as, for the time being, she and the sea were at peace. In time they would war again, as always was the case - as it was for her and her sisters, the other vessels aboard that same sea - but, for that moment at least, their arms had been laid down.

Easily the waves parted before her prow, no splash and splatter heralding her arrival and no deep swath of a wake in her passage, only a trail of a tail which followed her and the gentle slap of water on her hull, and she made her way into the world.


	20. 28

They lost the  _ Anne Marie _ in the hubbub of Port Royal, her masts and canvas blending in with those of so many others amongst who any arriving ship was made to weave.

It was as odd a port as any sort she’d ever come to know; entirely as odd, in fact, every single bit so. Every one was the same, for her, even despite their differences.

Her sails, billowing gently in the wind, filled with unfamiliar scents and perfumes; smokes of strange tobaccos and other plants, smelting gases of smiths, fragrances of women, whiffs of liquors the likes of which had never before filled her sails or holds.

The wood of the dock, when they excitedly threw their lines overboard and then - with no dock-crew awaiting their arrival - leapt over the rails themselves to tie off and make fast, was of a different sort than any she’d felt before. Different wood, but it always was, and it was of no consequence as thick swaths of cut up sailcloth and nets hung over the edge as a barrier, a cushion into which she rested when the men hauled on her lines and looped them around the dock’s thick cleats.

The water was warmer and the air as well, and the atmosphere. Her arrivals had always been matters of note, and even occasional fanfare, but rarely with an effect so immediate and so chaotic; dockhands often waited, ready at the sight of sail to help her make a berth and unload.

Not so here in Port Royal.

There were many waiting on the docks, indeed, and excited they were - excitement made clear with their bellows and shouts and cheers, hoisting aloft bottles or mugs, or one man even a large wooden  _ bucket _ , of ale or mead or other alcohols. Many on the docks, with narrowed eyes or wide ones, appraising and hoping and sizing up; slim eyes searching for hints of threat and seeking to defend, wide ones acting the innocent part in their own search.

Her holds rumbled with the sounds of the town, the cacophony of revelry that emanated from its every pore and portal, every balcony and boulevard. The cheering and laughter mixed through turned even more into a muddled sound of general merriment as the Captain, with a few of his longer-serving crewmembers now calling themselves officers under him, descended into her holds.

They pillaged and pulled as thoroughly as they ever had from any capture, taking every bit of coin and treasure; the chests filled with gems and trinkets, the sacks full of coins, the crates filled with jewel-encrusted goblets and filigreed utensils - even a single piece of eight that had fallen to the floor and ended up stuck in the gap between two of her boards was pried out carefully and the gap swiftly given a chaste kiss of thanks before the coin was thrust deep into a pocket.

Every bit of it, every gem and coin - save for the single piece of eight which had been so uniquely absconded with - was divided up amongst the crew, under the careful eye of the Captain and his new wheellock, but not a man amongst them made any move to take more than his share.

They’d all been around it for long enough beforehand, and never even keeping it for themselves; they’d been trustworthy throughout months at sea as Privateers, and they continued to be so as Pirates.

Or, at least, at that moment.

Her upper decks were thronged with men taking their share of the pilfered goods and doing his best to find some way of storing it - filling pockets and pouches, flipping up the fronts of their shirts and carrying great piles with them. One man even removed his shirt entirely and used it as a satchel of sorts for his treasure, a move which was met with laughter, applause, and a few whistles from the dockside.

When they all left - every man save for one, and every coin completely - she was so much higher in the water that she strained at the ropes, her mast tipping inward toward dock and land as she floated nearly up on top of the water.

A sharp whistle from the Captain still aboard her drew the attentions of some youths down on the dock, and a few coins tossed drew their aid, and they loosened off her ropes - and, after coercing the Captain to toss down a few  _ more _ coins, they even willingly reattached them rather than letting her float out into the harbour.

She sat straight then, her golden jibs furled but still shining proudly in the sun, bobbing lightly and high up but not to any concern.

That night, for the first time, she came to know many things.

Her deck planks, both above and below, so used to so much - used to the stomp of boots and the heavy footfalls of men, their gruff laughter and shanties, used to the wet slick of sea spray and blood, used to the sharp fall of cannonballs or the deep thump of their fire - came to know knew things; to know the click of women’s pointed shoes and the lighter patter of their unshoed feet, their light giggles and cooed entreatments, to know the wet slick of sweat dripped or spread by skin in a way with which she was unfamiliar, to know the soft fall of silken undergarments and the gallus cries of desperate passion.

Her gunports, previously only used for their namesake - for the cannons to poke their muzzles through and let out their thunderous barks - came to another use by one or two adventurous and entrepreneurial individuals (or, rather, couples) who instead thrust out their heads, to call out their delights at the dock or the open sea on the far side, the cannons pushed far back from the walls toward her midline.

Her cots, used only for sleeping previously, came to know a variety of new uses from the expected to the truly daring but all equally novel; the coils of rope and barrels and crates which dotted her deck or were set sparingly throughout her holds and halls, quite the same.

By the time the morning’s sun had risen, five of the men had found themselves new wives from amongst the women of the town; three of those five had found themselves done with said women, and one of those three had even gone so far as to find himself a second.

Most of the others had hardly engaged in anything that different, they only used different terms in reference.

Every pocket was lighter and emptier when they stepped back aboard, the men like their ship greatly divested of their things of worth and in arguably some worse shape for it - many of them listed more than she had when her too-tight ropes had pulled her down toward the docks - but on their faces were smiles the likes of which no blissful fool could hope to approach.

Still, with the haze in their eyes, the Captain thought it appropriate to ensure their wakefulness.

Her decks knew water again, great buckets of it thrown by his ‘officers’ upon the crew assembled - and, while it felt warm in comparison to the cold Northern seas to which she’d formerly been accustomed, the men certainly seemed to have no such opinion as they gasped and shrieked like cats so thoroughly doused.

With a laugh, the Captain gave the order to cast off, and threw another few coins down to those youths on the dock - the same ones as before, standing watching with hooded eyes which never strayed but also belied deliberately little explicit interest.

Her jibs unfurled, gold in her sails if not in her hold, and she set out with the crew of a mind to rectify the latter part as well.

The night had, after all, been well-received by all, by the men and by those who’d taken their coin - the bartenders and the jewelers, the clothiers and the women, the meat vendors and the meadsellers and more - and, of course, by the men themselves.

Well-received by all, but certainly not without its price, and so they needed more gold; as a thirsted tree’s roots might press aside rocks in their pursuit of water, as a swift river’s current might carve through canyons on its progress to the sea, so would these men displace or abolish any obstacle which stood between them and their goal.

She, though, the  _ Lady Isobel, _ had no such goal; all she had was a fine even keel set high in the water with her holds so empty, and full bright sails - as they dropped her gaff and her square, she had a long tail of wake, and then a spray along her bow from the water’s uprising at her swift arrival.

It rushed before her, just before as a herald, a sign of the coming  _ Lady _ , and she followed flawlessly and unerringly without a single pace, without a single doubt.

Indeed, without a thought.

 

\---

 

They were, unsurprisingly, quickly successful.

They were, after all, quite comfortable.

They ran through their familiar routine, but with a difference; this time, they had a black flag to fly, and the rules were different. They offered quarter at first, because they were not compelled to do so later.

As Privateers, they would be resisted, their prey would fight back - because they knew that, in the event of their own surrender, their lives were protected by accords.

If, on the other hand, they fought back against  _ pirates _ , they knew their lives were forfeit.

Not that accords had ever truly guaranteed much.

They were so much like men’s lines on the Earth, saying that this wave or that hill belonged to this nation or that one; their lines in the sand, saying that such and such a thing was unacceptable or would never be done.

They held true only so long as the men who upheld them did.

Indeed, there had been a time without Privateers and without pirates, as there had been one without the  _ Lady Isobel. _ Some things come and go, some linger forever.

When she flew the black flag with its skull and crossed blades, her quarry threw up no arms in return - no cannonfire and no attempts to evade, but rather, a white flag in return.

Her hull met another for what might have been the thousandth time in her life, ropes holding them fast together as the men ran across planks with growls and blades both brandished, descending into the other ship’s holds and taking what they would before leaving again.

They didn’t even take everything - less than they often had, when they were Privateers, in fact.

After all, who could say what was damage sustained on a ship  _ before _ they surrendered, and what was sustained afterward?

She couldn’t, certainly.

Two merchants in as many days, each one surrendering and giving over their holds to save their lives - and surely not all of their holds, either, as one crewmember leaving the latter of the two ships stubbed his toe and in doing so pulled up a loose plank, filled underneath with sacks of coin.

The Captain, wheellock in hand, roared and demanded the surrender of all they had, and two other such planks were promptly pried up and their contents surrendered.

No doubt, there were more, but none of the men felt much inclined to spend too long searching or threatening to force their surrender.

Neither did the  _ Lady Isobel _ \- as much as any thing yearns for any thing, she longed only to run free before the waves; every moment spent lashed to another ship was one of irritated creaks and groans from her boards and beams.

She wished to be sailing, not rafted to some merchant vessel, and the men wished for the same - for the wind in their hair, and also for the freedom it would bring in more senses than one.

Pirates were lawless, but their areas of practice not exactly unknown; thus, the way the Captain had been able to lead them there in the first place, and he was hardly the only one to have heard of such a thing.

Ships of various Navies plied the waters, looking to exert control or win favours or bounties from their respective commands, and any such ship would surely be glad to find a catch as fine as the  _ Lady Isobel _ all trussed up and held in a trap of her own making, hobbled to a merchant ship.

Or, at least, any such ship’s  _ crew _ would be glad for such a thing.

Resultantly, the crew cast off as swiftly as they could from their captures, and sailed off on their way.

One man sat in the bow, with a particular item of note: a red velvet cape, fit for a prince likely, to which he stitched scraps of sailcloth. A pair of crossed blades to match those aboard their black flag, and a skull to match as well, albeit with its jaw set wider - gaping, as if to scream and roar, or perhaps to devour - and, of course, the crown atop the skull, all on a background of red velvet.

A flag of no quarter.

The third ship they found had already been preyed upon by some other ship, a few of the men sporting bruises from failed attempts to hold on to certain trinkets, and the decision was made that it would be in everyone’s best interest for them to move further out from the Port, to where there might be less crossover with others.

Her rudder carved the sea, her figurehead tilting and swooping low across the waves, sabre outstretched as if leading her charge into battle - she took the fore, her bowsprit splitting the wind and her prow following suit with the seas.


	21. 29

 

There were not so many ships in the water as there were, for instance, people on the dock at any given port; they didn’t throng the sea’s often tempestuous surface, but there were enough of them that they were not an uncommon sight, particularly in and amongst the various islands on which many settlements and ports resided, either lawful or otherwise.

The larger islands, and larger ports, were understandable more closely guarded.

Any nation who staked a claim to any of this land, who drew their lines on their maps such that these areas were included, wished to defend that claim. The arbiters of that defense were, expectedly, the ships of their respective Navy, generally.

Mercenaries would join in sometimes as well - often pirates themselves, but willing to fly some nation’s flag or another, or at least uphold their interest, in return for some coin.

For a time.

On the tenth day out of Port Royal, the _Lady Isobel_ was all but bouncing off of the crests of waves, so swiftly was she bearing before the wind and so light were her holds. The waves met her - or she met the waves - with a firm and resounding _slap_ , and then withdrew for a moment only to return again, and again, and again. It was something between a display of open aggression and violence between herself and the sea, and a display of raw passion.

Up her single mast, the lookout stood in a basket they’d fashioned and installed - a wooden platform nailed to the mast, with railings and walls woven out of thick fibrous foreign plants of names unknown to any of them, but they served their purpose well and let him keep his focus on the spyglass.

A good thing, as well, because it was he who first spotted the three sails.

A call was sent out, and the Captain drew out a spyglass of his own, and the officers of the crew came to him for information and advice.

Three ships, seven sails - two merchants and a military vessel, from the looks of things, and there were many options presented to them.

They could, of course, simply turn away and sail off. It was always an option until they flew their flag - displaying such a clear ensign was an offence in and of itself, but while it still sat crumpled at the base of the mast, she and her crew had committed no wrong to be punished for. Or, at least, none which could be seen from any distance upon the seas.

They had the option of engaging as pirates usually would, coming in and flying the black flag, and hoping the ships would surrender themselves. This would, of course, ruin any hope of surprise.

Surprise being key to their third option, to leap upon them as they used to when they were Privateers.

Unknowing the discussions happening on her decks and the effects they might have on her wellbeing, the _Lady Isobel_ continued to send up great gouts of seaspray as her bow slapped against her lover and enemy, the sea.

A second man was sent to the top of the mast, and all crew told to stand as ready as they could; a water anchor was affixed, little more than a great board weighted to hang straight up and down in the water and in doing so cause a great slowing effect, and the _Lady Isobel_ was turned on to a gentle intercepting course.

Her sails were slacked so she no longer made such furious progress through the water, but the men were careful in which sails they did and did not let loose; they selected those which could be most quickly deployed again.

At her wheel, the Captain stood with both hands on her wheel and one of his officers beside him, one who held a musket in his hands.

It was clear that they were seen, as the other ships began to shift and change their tack to prevent certain angles - to make themselves more easily availed of their own guns dotting the sides, clearly not trusting the newcomer who approached them.

The _Lady Isobel_ didn’t have a hostile bent to her, though, or an aggressive approach - she was at entirely a poor angle for firing her cannons, the other ships focused at an angle off of her starboard side of the bow, where neither her sides nor her long nine could reach her.

Slowly, they raised up her black flag - let it fly, and fired the bow gun, off harmlessly into the water - and waited a moment to see if the three ships would surrender.

The hustle on their decks, the creak as their rudders swung round, the shouts - and, a moment later, the pops of three or four swivel guns which peppered the _Lady Isobel’s_ flanks with grapeshot - did no damage to her hull or her crew, but made their intentions known.

The ships, it seemed, would not be surrendering. They began, slowly, to turn to engage.

A chain, if loose, will spend time taking up slack when one side is pulled - if the links are allowed to rattle, they will waste moments in eliminating that rattle before the chain as a whole begins to move. A taught chain, however, one which is already stretched firm and tight, will move at the far end almost in the same instant that the near end is pulled.

As a chain, they were, every member of the crew and her as well - the Captain gave a shout and spun her wheel round, quite literal links in chains taking the strains as they transferred between wheel drum and ropes and tiller.

In the same moment, several other things happened: the man beside him fired his musket as a signal up into the air, the water anchor was thrown off of her port side, and the man who had ascended the mast dropped a heavy sack which was tied to a rope. Smoke wisped from a squealing pulley as his rope ran through it so fast, pulling up on its opposite end their red flag, their flag of no quarter.

As the flag rose, swiftly, the water anchor dragged sharply in the water, sending up a great racket and a thick spray of seawater, and - coupled with her large rudder which was run right up against the stops - causing her to list over and swerve through the water, slewing wildly.

In the space of a few seconds, her side was pointed directly toward the stern of the military ship which was serving as escort, and the next link in the chain - the gunners, below and above decks - moved in their appointed sequence.

Every cannon erupted almost at once, and the effect was devastating. The ship which had been sailing vaguely away from them, and had begun to turn to face them with a side, took most of the hits to the stern - the unarmoured and soft stern where shots shattered the glass windows and went careening down the whole length of the ship toward her bow.

In the next instant, a crewman cut loose the water anchor - letting it fall away and into the sea which so hungrily claimed it and swallowed it up - and the _Lady Isobel_ all but fell back onto an even keel as the men pulled her sails taught again.

Fully two of the military ship’s three masts tipped and fell, although her hull seemed to have sustained no great damage near the waterline and she stayed upright, but there were other concerns that were greater.

One of the merchants let off several shots at an oblique angle, one cannonball pluming the water and one thumping off of the _Lady Isobel’s_ gunwale with little to say for itself save for a few splinters and some damage to the paint, and the third punched a neat hole in through the hull on one side, slammed into a beam that supported the deck above and had once had a reinforcement bolted onto it by the Navy, cracked both beam and reinforcing member, and then fell to the ground with a thump.

“We’ll make ‘em eat their own meal,” one of the gunners announced with a laugh, shouting it to send the words overtop of the ringing in all ears after the cannonfire’s cavalcade in the small enclosed space - as the swabby and the powder boy behind him carried out their work on the cannon, he grabbed a large thick rag soaked, and grabbed up the still quite hot shot.

It looked still to be in good condition, or at least as good condition as it ever had been in - a few dents, but nothing of great concern - and seemed to fit the cannon’s mouth well. When they rammed it home, it went, albeit with a little more ramming required than most, and the gun crew let out another chorus of laughter.

Outside of the gunport, the world shifted and slewed; robbed of the greater context that being on top deck provided meant that the gun crew below, looking through their little hole alongside their cannon’s muzzle, had to be very good at timing. They didn’t know whether an enemy ship had changed course or tack, or whether another had come out from behind a nearby island; they could see nothing save for the small hole out into the world, hear nothing save for ringing or cannonfire, and feel nothing save for the bone-jarring thumps of the cannons when they fired.

In a way, they were quite as she was, knowing nothing of anything until it presented itself into hetir small sphere of influence; they knew no ship until they saw it emerge through their port, saw its prow bearing down on them and shouted with the nearness of it and its clear intent to ram; she knew nothing of the other ships either, not until the bow of one slammed against hers - not perpendicular, but still forceful enough to cause timbers to creak and planks to splinter.

She knew of the cannonfire when they did, when the Olympian hammer-blow of a cannon’s percussion would set her beams shaking as it made their bones shudder as well, feeling it right through to their core and spine just as she shook to the keel as well.

They knew of success or failure only when they saw planks dropping, one by one, and then a gunwale and then open water and air overtop of the deck of the ship they’d just sunk; she knew it the same, as a bowsprit hung down heavily against her side and crushed the bannisters and one crewmember there, and then relieved its force all at once when it snapped and the other ship’s hull scraped lines into hers as it clawed at her like a fist, incapable of effecting any grasp but still doing its damnedest.

Not quite sunk, as it turned out; the other ship canted heavily forward but was still very much afloat and her crew very much alive, as they proved in trying to leap aboard the _Lady Isobel’s_ decks and fight for their freedom.

Blood ran again, sprayed or dripped or gouted across her planks, meeting salty sweat and seaspray and running as one along the cracks between her boards until rejoining the ocean once more.

She knew no difference between the blood of her crew, and the blood of another. It was all blood, it was all red, it was all warm. At first. In time, it all turned cold - and, left longer, turned brown.

The cannons fired as they could, the deck guns loaded with grapeshot or canister and those below still firing balls - the swivel guns on the top deck, as well, were swung around and emptied at the other ships with devastating effect, loaded with lagrange - chunks of steel and bits of chain, the pieces of detritus accrued over time on any ship or in any blacksmith - and with removable breeches, each man having a half-dozen pre-loaded near his feet so he could simply fire, pull the breech out of the rear, run a swab through, slide the new breech into place, and fire again.

By the time the second merchant ship had run up a white flag, its sister was at least a third of the way into the water. The waves lapped above the decks at her bow, but only just, and they disturbed the bleeding bodies that lay there, encouraging them to slip away and join the dozens of their brethren floating around the ships - she flew no white flag, but only because there were hardly any left to fly it.

The ship of the navy still sat fairly upright, but with only one mast and with two fallen and entangling all her decks, she’d been largely unable to react or move during the fight - she flew no white flag, but largely because she’d hardly been involved in the fight in the first place.

 _Lady Isobel_ sat defiantly high in the water, her bow rising from the seas like any noble’s chin, her bowsprit like an outstretched rapier daring for a duel - yet, she _had_ dared, and the merchants had been foolish enough to take that dare.

The red flag flapped at her single mast above a sail that was tattered but still flying, and its colour was a herald for what would come.

Of the two merchants, one was mostly a loss - the one which had attempted, either intentionally or otherwise, to ram the _Lady Isobel_ , ended up becoming far too unstable for men to be aboard it quite quickly. They were able to take several things from the Captain’s cabin, handsome trophies and a pair of small chests each filled with gemstones, but that was all.

The second was in perfect shape after they boarded her, giving each man the choice of joining or dying - and then, on the order of one of the officers, telling the ones who had joined to dispatch those who had refused. Those who hesitated in the slightest to comply might as well have answered otherwise in the first place, anyway.

The ship, though, was in perfect shape, two masts and holds thick with treasure.

“What point transferring it?” A laugh came from their Captain, striding aboard with his wheellock out and gleaming in the sun. “We’ve no reason - if you took twelve, could you bring her back into port?”

The officer to whom he’d posed the question looked startled for a moment, then nodded resolutely, and the Captain clapped him on the shoulder.

“She’ll need a new name,” he commented, going to look at least at the loot which would not be loaded onto his ship for the return voyage.

 

\---

 

 _Surrender_ was what they named her, painting it over in thick black after shoving the bodies overboard.

The Navy ship they took as well, renaming her _Defiant_ , and it took some time to get her into a shape worthy of sailing. No damage near her waterline, but extensive damage within and two masts downed; it took the better part of the day to cut free all the lines and hack loose the few bits of wood holding them on and, with a degree of care, cast them off free of the ship.

Without the hanging masts, she moved, but slowly. Improvised jibs run an incredibly long distance from her bowsprit to the mast which had once been her central one helped improve the matter somewhat, but she would still make no swift time back to Port Royal.

However, she held rations for at least a hundred men, and now had only twenty. Plenty of food and plenty of time.

The Captain stayed aboard the _Lady Isobel,_ at least for the return journey - and, as the three of them sailed off as one, he told a man to clamber over her bow and make an addition there as well.

Two stars with blades underneath them, painted in below her name, and a skull with blades as well - and another addition, a slight one which had been mentioned before, but on that day, had been earned.

Together, the three of them - the _Surrender_ , the _Defiant,_ and the _Dread Lady Isobel_ \- carried off back toward Port Royal.

 

\---

 

They left the _Defiant_ there, a huge chest of gold coins and two of her thirty six pound cannons offered as payment to the shipwrights who said they would make her sea-sure again. Four men were left as well - the crew drawing straws to see who would be left ashore, and who would ship out once more.

The long straws got to stay.

 _Surrender_ followed alongside the _Dread Lady_ only for the course of a day or two, and then they split off; the Captain ensured first that certain things were made clear, certain rules of engagement and conduct, and a meeting time to return to the Port by.

When they came back, the _Surrender_ sported new sails and a small-ish ketch in tow which came to be called the _Spitter_ , and a half-dozen splintered holes in her port side. The _Dread Lady Isobel_ sported a new cook and new stained glass windows in her Captain’s cabin, and a square sail yard that had been removed entirely, and decks that were far more red than they had been upon leaving port.

Their next foray, the _Surrender_ returned listing and missing half of one of her masts, and the _Dread Lady_ returned with another vessel - the _Betrayal_ \- alongside her.

The _Betrayal_ had the clear look of a former ship of the Royal Navy to which many of the men had once sworn their oaths: the familiar paint scheme and the cut of her sails. She had none of the crew though, not any longer - or, at least, it was no longer possible to see the difference between them and the others.

Every arrival brought another rush of excited dockside folk, each looking to perhaps earn a bit of coin in this way or another - an enterprising lad juggled empty bottles while the men occasionally tossed a coin or two his way, and then one man had the bright idea of shooting at the bottles; the lad yelped when the first shot went off but the men threw ten times as many coins, and they began to join in more and more with the gunfire, so the lad offered a reward to the first man who could shoot a bottle successfully.

When one finally shattered, and rained shards of glass all over him, three separate crewmembers all claimed to have fired the shot which felled it. The resulting fistfight (and, then, the ensuing knife fight as well) allowed the young lad the opportunity he needed to take all the gold and flee.

There were so many others, as well - tailors, who outfitted the men with fine coats and cloaks which every one wore proudly. Haberdashers, who provided outlandish hats which were always displayed with glee. Women, who provided company and an accessory for one arm or the other - or both - and were always touted with great boastfulness.

Their next leave, they took the _Defiant_ along, ready as she was - ready and fine, as well, the _Dread Lady_ going along with her for the whole of their leave from the Port, hoping to provide some assistance if things turned suddenly sour on the less tested ship.

The _Betrayal,_ which had shipped out with _Surrender_ and _Spitter,_ returned.

Neither of the other two did.

She knew so many ships, from near or afar - knew them when their hulls rubbed along like friends shaking hands or like strangers distastefully rubbing elbows in a crowd, when their shots hit her from a distance like a shouted remark, when their things or pieces became hers.

She felt nothing of it, when they took away her four deck cannons and replaced them with new ones which were just as large but fully thirty pounds lighter, each - she felt the loss as it happened, the weight removed from her deck and that spanse of boards sitting empty, but then it was filled with new weight.

Even if it was different weight, it was a difference with no real distinction, as the ports always had been.

More or less, she noticed, in a sense; she noticed when a board which had been submerged for so long, just below the waterline, rose its green-gleamed self up out of the water - less weight, that she noticed, some. When her gunports came closer to the hungry sea’s surface, more weight, that she noticed.

In a sense. As a rock notices the rain.

Rain, too, she felt - on her planks, running pink sometimes. In her sails, causing them to sag heavily until they were quickly furled.

Her hull would splinter, and then on her return it would be pried open, bared to the sun and the world as fully as any of the women who took up the men’s shouted offers and thrown coins, opened up and operated upon as any surgeon’s patient, and they would take away the shattered boards and nail new ones into place.

Her sails would tatter, and be patched, and when a needle could hardly be passed through the thickness of canvas patch after canvas patch - when an awl could more easily be punched through a blacksmith’s thick leather apron than through her canvas sails - she would feel their lack when they were removed, and replaced by new ones which were always lighter for their lack of patches.

The cargoes through her holds changed, but they always had; tea or furs or silks, coins or jewels or bullion, it made no difference to her save for weight and stability. Gold was fine, but bullion was best to her; heavy, but stable, and resistant to sliding around the way gold coins would within a chest that was full to anything less than the brim.

She knew new footsteps on her deck with every docking and every outing; every time her hull touched another, or touched a dock, a new set of feet or five or twenty would come onto her decks. Sometimes they bore swords and shouts, sometimes they bore only small packs, sometimes they bore worried expressions, but it mattered not to her.

Below her bowsprit, the carved figurehead continued to hold her sword thrust proudly out - she carried on holding at her pearl necklace, and she still wore her crown, but some about her had changed. Her black tears had been redoubled, and for every time that the _Dread Lady_ was forced to limp back to port with her sails or crew or hull mangled, they painted in a grievous wound to the maiden’s body.

One, at first, a stab through her ribs that trailed thick red paint as blood down over her gossamer windswept dress. Another occasion, a vessel of one nation’s Navy or another, striking upon them as they were moored up with a merchant and offloading cargo - had it not been for the _Defiant’s_ nearness, they might even have not returned to the Port at all, and the maiden was decorated with a thick gash in her gut which poured red paint down one leg.

Another and another, until there were eight in total - acknowledgements of their mortality and boasts about it as well, times that they nearly perished but also times that they survived.

She foundered in a storm, filling with water in her bilge and coming to rest on a sandbar where they were able to bilge her out in the morningtime enough to get her afloat again.

One man tried to paint in the maiden’s cheeks, to resemble a drowned corpse, but the effect was somewhat lost in her general pallor. Not as clear as the red wounds, but in fact more chilling to most of the men who noticed it, particularly those who had been aboard her when it had happened.

A fight during a storm, drastic motions of combat conspiring with wind-tossed seas to shove her into rocks and rend a huge crack through her, so great she needed to be beached for three days to fix it to the extent that they were able to make their return - and even at that, they arrived heavily listing, perilously close to the waterline.

A bruise, painted in on the maiden’s face, representing the beating she’d endured; around the cheekbone and eye, as if from a punch in a bar brawl, and it came to be followed by another bruise on her side when a ship rammed her and broke her gunwale so thoroughly that she lost a deck cannon into the water.

All these additions, and the shard of glass remained firmly in place.

Conflicts, captures, blood and battering by winds and seas, and there were those who came to say that she might never perish - that they might carry on, painting her figurehead with wounds and wounds, with blood and bruises, until one day there was no space left and they were forced to either replace the maiden or to carry on to the _Dread Lady’s_ hull instead, until it filled as well.

Those who said that she was unsinkable, that perhaps she was as a revenante, unkillable because she had already been killed yet had refused to let that be the end of her - those who said that, until the end of time, she would ply the waves and sail the seas, scoring the water with her wake.

For eternity.

How foolish men can be.

They said, still, as they always had, that she had been made for the sea.

In that, they were right.

 

\---


	22. 30

Sunsets were a given, and rises as well; the sun carried on its way, regardless of the world below it in the truest sense of the word - it had no regard, whatsoever, for the events of the world for which its passage meant the accruement of another day.

Many, there were, many days and many nights, adding into weeks and months.

Ships and men came and went, joining through capture or through the swearing of fealty, leaving through destruction or other means.

There were some who came to think the Captain of the  _ Dread Lady Isobel _ \- the one who many of them called Captain and Commander - was soft, perhaps too soft for the life they led, and that he did not deserve the ship which he commanded nor the flotilla that followed her banner.

The  _ Defiant _ , when the two were out of port, struck her port side suddenly. Rushing over with blades and shouts and the fire of muskets and swivel guns, they painted her decks red as they had been so many times. The Captain had given the order to let blood dwell on her planks for a while, to stain, and they were a dark reddish-brown now as if carved from mahogany or teak rather than their true oak.

Dark reddish-brown, splashed with much more vibrant red where the blood fell.

The mutinous crew were defeated, though, held at bay with great loss of life on both sides, though they accused the Captain still of being too kind, too generous, too weak.

He chuckled, and said that perhaps he was generous - he had them sent back aboard their ship, and tied to the railings, every one, living or dead. Every member of the mutinous crew were given their ship back, and then they were given an oil lamp, flung on the deck to shatter.

In olden days, burial in a flaming ship had been an honour for fine warriors, but on that day - as the  _ Dread Lady’s _ sails filled with smoke and flakes of ashen former sail or wood or man - the Captain of their crew turned the ritual into a punishment for thieves and traitors, and he let no man doubt his generosity or his weakness again.

They stood their position there, the  _ Dread Lady _ creaking softly as she rocked in the wind, until the last tip of the  _ Defiant’s _ charred mast had slipped beneath the waves, and as they sailed off it scraped against her hull like a skeletal hand reaching up - beseeching, or perhaps grasping, as if to either pull itself back to the land of the living or otherwise pull her down into the underworld, but to no avail.

Unbothered, she sailed on. The long and ragged charcoal streak alongside her keel had worn off in the seas long before they made it back to port, anyway.

At the height of it all, nearly one out of every four in Port Royal called the  _ Dread Lady Isobel _ his own - be it because he had sailed upon her personally, or because he had sailed on another crew on another ship that also flew her flag. Almost a quarter counted themselves amongst the members of her ‘crew’, such as it was.

Not that any of them ever asked her about it.

Indeed, they called themselves members of her crew even moreso than her Captain’s, and her reputation grew as her crew did, swelling on and on like the eternal sea.

Days into weeks, months, years; neither the sun cared nor did she, but no thing is eternal.

Not without change, at least.

A rock might weather millenia before changing and becoming a signpost, or a ball for a catapult or basilisk, or becoming a stool for a shepherd to sit upon. So she had been, through the years unnoticed and still - and though they might call her an eternal vanguard, a banshee and a revenant unworldly and unending, it made no difference.

The sea, and she, carried on in their endless games.

Half a lover and half an enemy, the sea was to she - as was she, to it; grateful, of course, for the waves and surface upon which she sailed, but always bitter of the sea’s attempts to drag her down, so they said.

The sea, some said, was angered by the defiance of ships to sail upon its surface, and endeavoured to undo them for their brashness.

It wasn’t true, though. There was no thought to it, no bitterness or malice.

It was simply the way of things.

 

\---

 

The storm came with warning, as they often did. It came with wind, and with waves; it came with howls and shrieks as if every ghoul had been let loose of all hells and permitted one single avenue upon the Earth, and the skies and seas whirled about tempestuous as if to form that portal to the underworld.

The  _ Dread Lady Isobel _ weathered it proudly, her sails furled and soaked as her crewmembers were - canvas rolled and tucked away, and faces tucked away the same into flipped-up lapels or coat collars where possible.

Eleven storm lanterns on her deck, but no thing was ever perfect and eight of them had succumbed to the storm’s wild onslaught and been extinguished.

Daytime, it had been, broad and bright when the front rolled in from the horizon, but there was no shred of that light anymore. Dark grey enveloped the sky, and the ship and her crew as well.

She raced down a wave, her storm jib and her rudder keeping her in some semblance of control, but with waves that rose higher than her gunwale, they could only hope.

The men laughed, though - they mocked the storm and whatever angry god had sent it, they thumbed their noses and shouted slurs and said that she, the  _ Dread Lady, _ would see them through, as she always had.

None of them asked her, as her timbers creaked and groaned in the maelstrom.

Even though furled, the winds ripped at her sails, tearing at the edges and pulling ropes taught; as she rose up toward the crest of a wave, the gale abruptly shifted directions and ripped her storm jib away with a shriek.

Men scrambled like so many insects aboard her to get another jib deployed, to keep her underway and under control, and her rudder swept through the rudder trying to accomplish the same. Her keel kept her more or less straight, dragging through the water like a long low fin of a fish.

A wave lifted under her and was then struck across by another, and she was flung in the spray, loose objects lifting a few inches from her deck before she slammed back into the water and they slammed back down to her.

Her hull and keel groaned in complaint at the affront, but it was inaudible over the storm’s fury. Even the men in her holds and bilge, those passing buckets to each other hand over hand, did not hear the creak of her beams as they shouted and rushed to fill their buckets as swiftly as possible.

There were eight of them, caught up in the storm; she, and two sisters, the  _ Red Velvet _ and the  _ Aberlour _ , hoping to make prey of a small convoy of three merchants and a pair of military or mercenary escorts.

The world didn’t stop for a storm.

Her cannons briefly overcame the storm’s wail, thundering as every one flashed almost half as bright as the lightning which split the sky above her sails; as if in mockery, just after her cannons, twice as bright and ten times as loud, Mother Nature looked down at her with a thunderous laugh as if to say,  _ “Is that all you have?” _

The  _ Red Velvet  _ had lost half of one of her masts, and slewed wildly in the gale; her sails flapped free and she was unable to gain control, knocking heavily sideways into one of the merchant ships and causing damage to them both. At a bit of a distance, the  _ Aberlour - _ a much larger ship, with thrice as many masts and cannons as the  _ Dread Lady _ \- let off her withering shout of cannonfire upon one of the military ships.

With a shudder, the ship exploded entirely, sending shrapnel aflame in every direction; for an instant, just an instant, the brightness of the fireball overtook that of the lightning - for a moment, just a moment, the shuddering thump of the ship’s demise was felt by every other vessel overtop of the storm’s cavalcade of furies.

Only a moment, though.

The  _ Dread Lady Isobel _ veered, her rudder swinging as she took on water through a hole in her bow that the men within her struggled desperately to patch. Her rudder snapped back the other way, sending her the opposite way up a wave and pulling her bow up enough that the men could see the lightning-torn sky above them through the hole for a few seconds before she crested the wave and slapped back down.

Onboard the ship that the  _ Red Velvet _ had struck, their flag was hoisted, the men having taken advantage of the opportunity. It looked as though the  _ Velvet _ herself might not make it through the storm, listing heavily and rubbing up against the merchant, but the crew had perhaps found themselves a replacement already.

Atop a wave, the Captain spun the wheel, and a look of shock crossed his face when its motion was too free and easy - the cables and chains were still firm, but she tipped forward on the wave and her stern lifted from the water and gave him no control.

When she slid forward, it was as with vengeance or with terror, either seeking to outrun the furious skies or hoping to impale the vicious seas.

Her bowsprit sank fully into the water, the seas sloshing over her upper deck as well, and all back along her hull water gushed into gunports where they hadn’t been slammed shut quite quickly enough. She slogged through the wave, rising to the surface slowly as if she’d been there for some time, as if only waking in the morning and not yet fully prepared for the day.

Slowly, but she rose.

The other escort fired at her, cannonballs sending up spray that was impossible to discern from the heavy rain and thick seaspray that was already surrounding them or causing splinters and holes that only matched the ones already there. She returned fire in kind, shots bouncing off of thick wood in places and striking true in others, sending up plumes in others still.

An opportunistic and lucky shot from the long nine in her bow sent flame roaring out along her bowsprit, the ball sailing and burying itself in the stern of the other merchant ship. The storm took over, ripping and pulling at sails attached to a mast which had been weakened by a hit, and over the course of the next forty-five seconds or so, the mast slowly twisted and toppled.

Only the one escort was left, and not for long; another salvo from it, another from the  _ Aberlour _ which had managed to come around, and another two from the crew of the  _ Dread Lady, _ firing as they ran up a wave and then being spun around at the top of it to race back down again and loose the other side.

The ship floated low and listing in the water, seemingly unmoving, drifting as an unminded helm does, and the men spared a moment for a cheer.

Only a moment, though.

The storm cared not for the battle or its ending, the sea unsated by the one vessel which it had been offered. It only carried on in its own eternal battle, one which might know many ceasefires for weeks or months of fair weather, but would always return to the same tempest in time.

A lookout gave a shout of spray in the water; rocks, some distance away, and coming closer.

It was fitting, perhaps.

She was as a rock, after all, in so many ways; she was what she was made, she was what she  _ was _ and only that - when she was wet, she knew water, when she was used as a weapon she was dangerous. She was ever so much like a rock.

When two rocks collide, it is the harder and the firmer which survives the collision, without fail.

So it was when a wave dropped her down atop the rocks which stuck like the land’s own gnarled fist to the sky: she hit with a thump that every man aboard her felt a hundred times as much as any cannon shot, one which shook every board and bone beam of her, which widened gaps between planks and caused a great cracking sound as her hull was rent a few feet away from her keel.

The sea, so very anxious to finally be granted entry into her holds where it had been denied so long, rushed in with a fervour unmatched by even the most desperate of sailors returning to shore after a long leave, as men fled screaming from the flood.

She listed over as her bilge filled more and more, the at first furious entry of water soon calming as its levels rose and rose within her - the more of it there was, the calmer it seemed to move, but all the more inexorably as well.

Her gunports were almost at the waterline by the time frantic footfalls made it up through her hatches and to her afterdeck, by the time desperate shouts told her Captain that she was sundered, and sure to sink.

The water outside of her hull embraced that inside her hull like an old friend as they lapped overtop of the bottom of her gunports, covering half her cannons. Men trying to flee let go their ropes, and the cannons on the far side slid down to strike against her sides and trap others there.

Her hull was held up to the sky, presented to the lightning for judgement, and whether it was judged to be wanting or to be sufficient was impossible to determine from the storm’s ongoing fury as the men scrambled to get a pair of small launches in the bow ready.

They cut loose cargo nets and ropes, freeing whatever they could that would float and hoping that it might bear them out, as she dipped further and further toward the water. Everything on her decks - cannon, crate and man alike - shifted and slid and fell, and her square sail’s long yard pierced the water as if in some last attempt to inflict a wound.

She had gunports forward only so far, and past them - in her bow - a pocket of air was held, for a time, even as her stern swung lower and lower and the water rose up her deck planks. Men in boats or grasping onto crates and barrels wailed, pitifully softly over the storm’s backdrop, as she pitched and sent up a great bubble from below the water as her sails, knowing air for the last time, slipped below the waves.

Her figurehead stared blankly up at the sky, crown atop her head, and clutched at her pearl necklace as she brandished her blade in one last threat or one last salute, and the last sight of her was her long bowsprit, sinking foot by foot below the roiling surface, a blade pointing in the wrong direction to do any harm.

It was all over, so quickly.

For them.

She, though, had more yet to experience.

Below the surface, there were no screams. No wails of terror or laments, only the faintest echoes of the rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning.

On every inch of her, she knew the water, as the sea embraced her like a lover finally reunited, like prey finally caught, like an enemy finally overcome, and pulled her deeper and deeper down to join so many of her sisters.

Mother Nature took back what had been stolen from her, the trees which had been felled and hewn into beams, the rocks which had been smelted and refined into metal, the sands which had been fired into glass - all came to return to Nature, out of the hands of men, beyond their lines and their names.

The sea called her nothing, as her stern touched the ocean floor. It sank into the muck and soft sand and she tipped, forward and sideways, and slid a short ways down a slope of sorts. Behind her, like a wound, like a tail, stretched a short furrow in the seafloor.

She rested, cradled as smoothly as she’d ever been, her beams and boards freed from the stresses of floating; she creaked and groaned as she settled, but then, once she was set down and still, she made no noise in the slightest.

Occasionally, when the currents of the water would pull at her sails like the winds, she would speak again - would sing a complaint of her rest being disturbed, a chorus of groans as wood rubbed on wood and dragged through muck, and that tail of hers would grow longer, but in time her sails came to be tattered and then absent altogether as bit after bit was dissolved or devoured.

A crew of fish and crustaceans came to replace her crew of men, her cannons being home to sea creatures who nestled in their muzzles and poked out their heads and waited for passersby to snare, much as she’d once done from coves or inlets.

Above, far above, above the waves and the skies and all else, the Sun continued on its course and the Earth as well, and sunrises and sunsets were seen all across the globe.

None were seen by her, but then, none ever had.


	23. Epilogue

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

_ “How _ are you sure?”

“Look at where we are! This matches all accounts of the sinking; that outcropping we caught on the sonar back there was probably the same one that-”

“That was thirty feet below the surface, though.”

“Sea levels have changed, and there’s no accounting for the troughs of waves that night - as well as which, erosion happens, and maybe the outcropping’s changed a little in the last five or six hundred years, anyway!”

“Alright, alright, you’ve got a point. Maybe. We should prep the-”

“Already have Sven and Emily on it, we’ll be ready to take a closer look in about forty-five minutes.”

“Okay, well… fingers crossed, here, I guess. This is exciting!”

“You’re telling me, ha!”

 

\---

 

For the first time in a very long time, her planks knew light.

Bright light washing over them, illuminating the grooves that had been worn by tiny eaters of debris that had feasted upon her for years, clearly displaying the sea weeds and critters which had made her as much their home as any other outcropping on the seafloor.

Clearly and brightly illuminating her name, affixed to her bow in wrought iron letters;  _ Dread Lady Isobel. _

For the first time, in a very very long time, she knew the touch of something other than a fish or a crab, when a metal capsule bumped into her prow.

“Hey, watch it,” a man muttered in a vessel far above.

“Yeah, yeah,” a woman murmured back, her lips barely moving in her focus, “I don’t see you offering to pilot the drone sub.”

“That’s right, you don’t.”

She felt a wash across her decks, small propellers spinning quickly and sending out currents that disturbed the grime which had accumulated, as the small submersible roved all around and over her with its bright lights and its camera.

Not that she knew what any of it was - but then, she never had know what a net or a rudder was, either.

Fittingly, she no longer had either.

The rudder was some hundred and fifty feet behind her, at the end of a long trailed gouge where it had shattered off of pintle and gudgeon when she’d hit the floor stern-first, and the nets had simply abated in time along with the sails, and with a fair portion of her wood as well.

“Looks like a lot of her’s been preserved by the muck covering her,” the man stated, pointing at the screen and resting his other hand on the woman’s shoulder.

She wore a grin that was as bright and excited as any, the toes of one shoe tapping giddily at the floor. “Yeah,” she sighed, “looks like. Well, time for step two, now…”

 

\---

 

They fit her with a sling.

It didn’t fit as well as the seafloor had.

It couldn’t, possibly - couldn’t conform to her as well as that soft muck in which she had dwelt for centuries, and she protested her removal with fearsome creaks and the sloughing of several planks.

They’d taken her cannons first, one by one, men and women with masks and fins and bubbling tanks at their backs coming down to attach things to each cannon which then inflated, and two or three of the men and women would swim the cannon up to the surface.

It took days, not that she knew.

Then came the cradle, and then, the lifting.

For the first time in a very, very long time, her beams and boards knew air. Her mast, bereft of sails, still knew wind once more as she rocked not on the waves herself, but slung in a cradle over the deck of a ship twenty times the size of her which telegraphed the motions of the waves into her instead.

They took her to land, not to a drydock as she’d known so many times but to a building of some sort, massive and damp with saltwater in the air where they descended upon her as any crew in the docks ever had - different tools, but she never knew the difference anyway.

They came with hand tools and with devices to measure, they came with sprays and with scrubs and with long wands that misted fluids out off the tip; they spent months and years upon her, working to halt what the sea had spent so long setting in motion: her decay.

When they were finished, they put her inside of an airplane and they flew her back home, to England, and put her up in another building - one with great glass windows in the ceiling through which the sky could be seen but no rain ever stretched, and they surrounded her with ropes and with placards.

Swarms came to see her, but never to touch; she never knew the touch of one of them, save for the select few who came from the building she’d been restored at for so long, who returned from time to time with tools and soft touches and usually a pat on her beams.

Hundreds, thousands, more - a thousand times as many as the largest crowd that ever had seen her off or cheered her return, passed through the halls of that building, and surrounded her with interest and curiosity.

They called her by every name by which she’d ever been known, either by the men who sailed her or by others - they called her  _ Isobel Worth _ and they called her  _ Rapier, _ they called her  _ Schurke _ and called her  _ Pomegranate, _ they called her the  _ Lady Isobel  _ and the  _ Dread Lady _ and the  _ Queen of the Seas, _ they called her the  _ Banshee Pirate _ and many more.

They called her an incredibly important find, they called her a beautifully preserved piece of history; they called her magnificent and gorgeous, they called her fascinating and intriguing, they called her a hundred thousand different things.

They called her she.

Deep below layers of paint, and grime, and paint, and more paint, a shard of glass lay stuck, preserved, within the cheek of a carved maiden.

A perfectly preserved relic.

And they called her she.

 

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading.


End file.
